#incredibly complex puzzle to put together in which i need to be constantly learning new things & concepts

[red-dyed-sarumane]

i have a new theory for aru sekai fans & by new i mean someone else might have caught on already but i havent seen it said SO. the rute furutewoa melody is in kyuuyaku, touhikou, & now kannagi (maybe elsewhere bc i havent been looking for this motif before i only realized it today really & i havent had time to go thru all the songs again yet) & we have kyuu (past), something in touhikou im too tired to remember currently but i remember calling something similar a while ago when someone asked if there was a timeline to this, and now kannagi that uses the older language so im willing to bet this motif is a way of saying the events in the song happened in the "past". whether thats actually Long Ago or just to say its not the current situation or just happened before the songs without it i cant say for sure but i think it makes sense given what we have now.

just like we have the nami no ne no motif that signals which characters still have their "self" if its in the song or lost it if its not.

i have to do some more digging of course but with what i know right now this makes the most sense to me

[sunbeams-and-honey]

hi im new to astrology and i just wanted to know what does it mean/how it affects me and my future if i have sun, mercury, venus all in gemini 10th house, moon in aquarius 6th house, virgo rising and also pisces mars in 6th house. thank youuu.

Hi darling! Thanks for the question.

Your combination of a Gemini Sun and an Aquarius Moon makes you a very captivating person. You're someone who can definitely trust in your intuition and you also benefit from a witty foresight. You are absolutely capable of improving yourself and making positive changes for yourself. You're intellectually energetic, which means that you can go on for ages with any activity involving your mind, such as writing or solving puzzles. You have a deep need to express your individuality as much as you can, as well as being stimulated at all times. You are more or less terrified of being bored. You are so busy so much of the time that boredom seems to affect you more intensely as you're not used to staying still and relaxing. You really enjoy and benefit from finding new ways of looking at and thinking about something, and also from establishing connections between different things. It's really satisfying for you when something finally clicks in your mind.

Your Sun is in the 10th House, which means that you work hard in order to achieve your goals and to also reach a certain status. You are excited by the idea of having power, but make sure that this desire does not make you cruel. You might want to be famous at some point in your life but you want to live an honourable and dignified life while doing so. That being said, you may be prone to getting into scandals if you're not careful. You want to be in charge where possible and you aren't afraid of the responsibility that comes with it. If you were to be put into a position of leadership then you'd know exactly what you'd be getting into. You're very determined to make a name for yourself and to be a good role model to others. You're likely to have a good reputation.

You have your Moon in the 6th House, which makes you someone who is obsessed with being healthy and organised at all times. A lot of your emotional satisfaction and stability depends on how hard you work, which can be a problem if you don't work as hard as you think you should. You have to understand that you have limits and you're allowed to relax without having to work for it. You are caring and emotional, and very empathetic. You get very stressed when you can't be of any help to anyone else. You may be prone to have physical pain when going through emotional distress or pain. You tend to feel very energetic and alive when there is nothing worrying you and when everything is going your way.

Your Gemini Mercury means you have great social skills. You are charming and eloquent in your speech. You are a quick thinker decision-maker. You always have something interesting to say so people always want to talk to you. You may find that you're the one carrying the conversation a lot of the time. You have the tendency to exaggerate sometimes. People are fascinated by your intelligence and knowledge. You know a bit about everything. You're constantly thinking about more than one thing at a time and because of this, you can forget about very important things every now and then, such as birthdays or anniversaries.

Your Mercury is in the 10th House, which makes you very good at solving problems under pressure. You're not one to back down from a challenge just because everyone else does. In your personal life, there will be a huge emphasis on self-improvement and general achievements. You highly value your goals in life and you are a natural communicator and public speaker. Even if you're shy, you have a great way with words, which leave a huge and lasting impact on those around you. You're very articulate. Your career is very important to you. You don't see it as merely a job, it's something with which you put effort into and care about.

You have your Venus in Gemini, which means you are very talkative and witty, especially when with your friends. You are very skilled with your words. You may love deep and complex subjects such as philosophy and once you find someone who shares this appreciation, then there will be no one stopping you from discussing it at all hours of the day and night. You are skilled with mediating conflicts and settling arguments before they become too big and destructive, and this is largely down to your persuasive skills. You need someone who appreciates and, to an extent, shares your intelligence and thirst for knowledge. You are very transformative, most likely going through many important changes throughout your life.

Your 10th House Venus makes you someone who wants to make a valuable contribution to the world. You want to change things for the better and will do everything in your power to make that happen. You want to make the world a brighter place too, spreading love and positivity wherever you go. You'll probably make a good career out of one of your hobbies. You might be the type of person to have an Etsy shop. You like being the centre of attention because you want to be appreciated for the things you have done. Some people can see you as pretentious because you want the nicer things in life and because you surround yourself with influential people. They don't realise though that you do this to keep as many doors open as possible when it comes to opportunities.

All of this means you have a Gemini stellium, which means you really embody Gemini qualities, more so than your average Gemini Sun. You are quick to both crack a joke and to put the pieces together and solve a problem. You are probably the life of the party. You have a great ability to relate to anyone, which is something that really helps other people. You may find that others often turn to you for comfort and support because they feel seen and heard by you. People can struggle to keep up with you at times albeit entertained by the stories you have to tell. You always have something interesting to say.

This also means you have a 10th House stellium, which makes you someone who loves their independence. You're not one to typically listen to authority figures unless you absolutely must. You might benefit from working for yourself one day rather than for somebody else. You are ambitious and not one to mess around once you get down to something. You may have had some kind of issues with a parent, or someone you viewed as a parental figure, at some point in your life. You know the best path to success, and are hellbent on staying on that path.

I've already gone over what it's like to have a Virgo Rising! You can find the post here.

Your Mars is in Pisces means that you are the kind of person to fight for your dreams. You are a walking contradiction, both sensitive and powerful, though perhaps it is your sensitivity itself that makes you powerful. You prefer to go with the flow rather than planning for the future or being in control. You want and expect things in your life to just happen naturally. Even if you are a hardworking person, you don't expect all your hard work to just go to waste. You want to get something from it. This can make you confident enough to go after your goals and dreams, but it can also lead you to getting easily disappointed.

You have your Mars in the 6th House, which makes you someone who is prepared to work incredibly hard for your dreams and goals. You love helping other people, but you have to watch out for people who use this kindness of yours and exploit it. Remember you can say no. You are productive, efficient, and almost always ready to work. You rarely ever seem to get tired so you do run the risk of burning out because you work so hard. You have the tendency to become impatient and irritable when other people do things in a different way to you. You have an amazing capacity to pick yourself up after failure or mistakes.

Words Of Advice:

Learn to relax more, maybe even meditate!

You need to learn how to balance your work life and your personal life.

Try to depend less on validation from others.

Maybe choose an area to specialise in rather than knowing a bit about everything and not properly committing to something.

Be more open to new experiences.

You don't need to take on every single challenge thrown at you.

Try changing your ways of doing things every now and then.

Remember to slow down every now and then.

You don't have to be working 24/7.

Pay more attention to your friendships.

Be mindful of who you spill your secrets to.

Try to keep your expectations realistic.

Thanks for the question darling and I hope this helped! Sending good vibes your way and have a wonderful rest of your day!

[wordsnstuff]

20 Mistakes To Avoid in YA Fiction/Romance

* This is a re-upload due to the original being flagged a few months ago for having a gif of two teenagers...*GASP*... dancing. What, tumblr? What is “adult” about that? The post has been in appeal for 4 months, and I have a feeling it won’t leave, so I decided to finally repost it. 

--

YA Fiction is an incredibly popular genre of literature, and most people have picked one up and devoured it in less than a day, but there is a trend in the genre where in certain instances, people forfeit quality for a cheesy dramatic plot. A lot of these stories are just regurgitated cliches with vaguely interesting characters and just enough drama, fluff, and mildly (or extremely) sexual content to keep the reader paying attention. (No shade to the authors, because obviously, any author who writes and publishes a book works hard, no matter the end product.)

There are a lot of aspects of YA Fiction that repeatedly rear their ugly heads and annoy readers or flat out scream dangerous messages to the young people that indulge in them. I thought I’d put the spotlight on a few in the hopes that it will help clean up the genre’s reputation as new and more awakened authors contribute content to it.

Below you will read about some common mistakes that YA Fiction/Romance writers make that either ruin the story, promote dangerous messages, or unrealistically portray teenagers.

Forgetting The Supporting Characters

The supporting characters are an important part of any story, even if the main plot revolves around two people. Supporting characters provide subplots, information to the reader, and more opportunities for your audience to connect and relate to your story. It’s always good to give your supporting characters love and attention when creating and writing them. Sometimes they end up carrying the story.

A mistake that a lot of authors make is that they give the reader a couple defining characteristics, a name, a relationship to the main character, and then just make that character pop into the reader’s view whenever the main plot needs them to. No backstory. No life of their own. Just support to the plot, and that’s a huge waste of potential. You don’t want your readers to put down your book and either forget the supporting characters existed at all, or believe that they were extra pieces of a puzzle.

Using Slang Badly

Writers should not feel the need to include current slang in order to make their story more relatable or popular amongst their targeted demographic. Slang is constantly changing, evolving, and most importantly, dying. Not to say that you should only write in traditional terms or put “thy” and “thee” everywhere, but using standard English and avoiding the trendy but temporary slang words is key.

If you must use slang, try to use the bare minimum and only in fitting circumstances. If your character is the type to say “OMG her dat boi memes are on fleek” then, by all means, go right ahead, but you probably cringed when you read that. That would have been totally normal 2 years ago, but every bit of that sentence has died over time, and no matter how much you think a slang word will stick, don’t risk it.

Sympathy and Envy Mongering

Two emotions that YA Fiction and Romance always try to invoke in their readers are sympathy and envy. The author either wants the reader to feel bad for one or many of the characters, or they want them to be jealous of the awesome (and usually unrealistic) lives the characters have. Don’t be one of these. It’s tired and boring and not original in the slightest.

Are sympathy and empathy both totally okay emotions?

Yes.

Are they all you need to write a good story?

Nope. Not at all.

The reader needs and wants to feel more than jealous of and sad for the characters in the story. The best stories are the ones that trigger a complex whirlwind of emotion. Sympathy and envy are the easy way out, and you get out of those emotions what you put into them.

Unrealistically Portraying Teenagers & Teenage Life

Teenagers look up to and compare themselves and their lives to the characters and lives of the characters in your story. Keeping in mind that your audience is young and impressionable is essential for authors of the genre.

Love At First Sight

Love-at-first-sight does not happen. Infatuation, maybe, but love is more complicated than that. Writing a plot based on “love at first sight” can leave a bad taste in your readers’ mouths from the start, and that is something you should avoid at all costs. On top of that, love-at-first-sight is a very easy-way-out move and if you’re dedicated to your characters and your story, there’s a good to fair chance that you can come up with a more satisfying build up.

Unrealistic Romantic Situations

If you’ve ever opened a YA Romance, chances are you’ve read a scene in which the protagonist and the love interest end up in a stunningly beautiful place and the love interest sweeps the protagonist off their feet prior to riding into the sunset. This, unfortunately, does not happen very often, especially in teenage relationships. The most romance you’re going to get (usually) is the love interest offering to pay for the protagonist’s bag of skittles with the leftover money from their paycheck they earned at McDonald’s.

Just because teenagers don’t really go to great lengths to rent an entire ice-skating rink in the middle of the night so they and their crush can skate to Ellie Goulding music doesn’t mean there can’t be cute and memorable moments. Great doesn’t always equal grand and that’s important to remember. A lot of the time, teenagers appreciate fantasizing about things that are actually possible.

Happy Endings

Not all stories have to end happily, and you’ve definitely been told this before, but nobody ever takes into account how stories about teenagers have so much potential when it comes to endings. Teenagers read books about teenagers and unfortunately, this means that a lot of them will take what you’re writing about and try to change their own lives to match. Be honest in your depiction about what actually happens when you leave high school.

The majority of the time, high school sweethearts won’t stay together. Long distance won’t work, they’ll find someone else, the spark will die out, their personalities will undergo drastic changes, and their goals and plans for the future will turn out differently than they expected. “And they lived happily ever after” is criticized harshly for a reason, especially in YA and YA Romance. Most stories don’t end happily, but there is more than one story in a person’s life and giving a person their happy ending as they graduate high school is a great injustice, to your character and your readers.

Avoiding The Dark Parts Of Teenage Life

Teenagers, despite what a lot of the media claims, go through some really serious and stressful and damaging things. Teenagers suffer from mental illness and deal with the intense pressure of the education system and hold their heads high in the face of stigma over every little detail about them. They suffer from eating disorders and body dysmorphia and self-harm tendencies, and that doesn’t even bring into account the bullying and family issues and the stress of constantly learning and feeling things for the very first time with little to no guidance or assurance or resources to ask for help. It is hard being a teenager. Do not forget that, and don’t leave the actual teenagers reading your story feeling underrepresented and/or abnormal because they aren’t as stress-free as the characters they look up to.

Exaggerating How Teenagers Interact With Each Other

A lot of teenage interactions are short, awkward, and uneventful. Teenagers aren’t super eloquent and socially apt, but YA Fiction seems to believe they are. It’s quite rare that a teenager will just walk up to someone they like, say “wanna go to dinner on Saturday?” and all will be fine and dandy. It’s quite rare that a teenager will saunter up to someone who talked about them behind their back, say something super clever and damaging to their enemy’s ego, and saunter off like the king/queen of the world. Those interactions look great in our heads, but they usually contain a few stuttered words and “um��s and blushing. Confidence is usually a trait that people develop later in life, so try not to push it if you’re trying to be realistic.

Maturity of Teenagers

Teenagers are underdeveloped human beings with minimal experience in most areas of life. They do not have it all figured out. A lot of YA books revolve around characters that are extremely intelligent, disciplined and ambitious at a level of maturity a 25-year-old be on. This is not accurate. Making characters “awkward” or “childish” does not have anything to do with how mature they seem to readers. There is a distinct difference between an awkward girl with childlike innocence and a girl who makes mistakes, does not have her life figured out, and is not yet comfortable with casual social interaction. The latter things I mentioned are pretty universal when it comes to teenagers.

Unfitting Aspirations

There are more than two paths in life. It seems that in YA you’re either going to graduate, get married, pop out a couple kids and live the rest of your life in the suburbs, or you’re going to leave home, go to college, travel for 20 years and settle in some random country in Europe writing poetry until the end of your days. There is no in between, which sucks. There are a lot of interesting things you can do in life, not to say that either of the two life paths I mentioned are uninteresting. You could take a gap year and travel the world, go to college, move back home for a couple years then maybe get a job that has you traveling and exploring new things for the rest of your life. You could meet the love of your life in college and have some kids but put them in online school so you could travel with them. You could live your whole life in an awesome cabin in the forest casting spells and adopting wild squirrels. There are so many ways life can be and restricting it to opposite extremes takes the imagination out of the future.

Not All Teenagers Think Their Relationships Will Last Forever

This one is pretty self explanatory, so long story short, not every relationship a teenager enters into is with the end goal of staying together forever, or even more than a few months. Most teenage relationships are pretty short and not very meaningful, and portraying every single couple in your stories as “we’ve been going strong for 2 years and plan on getting married right after graduation” is inaccurate and will probably cause your readers some disappointment in the future.

Relationships Aren’t A Teenager’s Only Concern

Most teenagers are more concerned about the F they got on a History test than they are about who they’re going to stare at next period. Everyone has more than just their crush to worry about. Some teenagers have to worry about where they’re going to get their next meal or how they’re going to get a ride home from school or even how they can apologize to a friend they’ve hurt. It’s not all about relationships for teenagers, in fact, relationships are a pretty small part of teenage life. If all your character has to think about is the hottie they sit next to in Biology, perhaps you should work a little more on character development.

Unnatural Appearances

Most teenagers are not model-level attractive. All teenagers have break-outs and leave the house late with greasy hair or with their shirt on inside out. No teenager shows up at school every day looking absolutely flawless, as if they’re about to walk down the runway. Please keep that in mind, because portraying teenagers accurately, especially when it comes to physical aspects such as weight, acne, etc. is super important. In YA and YA Romance, you must keep in mind that the teenagers you are trying to appeal to should not feel like a piece of trash because they aren’t as perfect as your characters. Yes, YA Fiction is Fiction, but just because you know that it’s unrealistic doesn’t mean your readers do. Readers of YA Fiction compare themselves to the characters in your books whether you like it or not. It is not hard to realistically portray physical appearances of teenagers.

Avoiding Dangerous Messages

A common problem found in YA Fiction is the lacing of dangerous messages found in the smaller details. You may miss them the first couple times you read a story, but if you go looking for them, you will find them, and perhaps you will find the source of a lot of mistakes you’ve made. YA has a bad habit of endorsing mindsets that lead to bad decisions. Some of them, however, can be avoided in your own writing.

The Need To Change The “Flawed” One

Nobody in this world is perfect. Expecting the person you supposedly love to be flawless all the time is not realistic. People make mistakes. People are not always happy and bubbly and confident about themselves. People do not always act the same one day as they did the day before. Human beings are flawed and should be portrayed as such, especially in the stage of their life which is the most confusing and scary. Teenagers are underdeveloped human beings, and for some reason, teenager girls in YA Romance expect teenage boys to be charming and loving and never ever make a mistake, which is ridiculous. Creating love interests that appear flawless and can make no mistakes is detrimental to your audience. It raises your readers’ expectations to an unattainable level which causes them disappointment and might cause their future partners unrepairable damage to their self-esteem because they’ll think that in order to find a partner, they cannot be flawed and cannot make mistakes.

Glorification Of Illegal Activity

It’s not “cool” or “edgy” to pump yourself full of deadly and mind-altering substances you know absolutely nothing about. It doesn’t make you “badass” and it isn’t a personality trait unless that trait is stupid. Whatever your position is on drugs or alcohol or whatever, there is no excuse for putting the idea in the heads of young readers that doing things that are illegal and addictive and that might even get you killed is ok. Not only because most of your readers are younger than 21, but because it will always be dangerous to take drugs, commit crimes, and drink. Your choices are your choices. Don’t impose your habits and excuses on kids who don’t know any better.

Slut Shaming

News flash: it’s 2017, people. Nobody cares who you’re kissing or dating or having sex with. People are finally getting used to the idea that maybe, just maybe, it’s not the end of the world if you do whatever you want, as long as you’re not hurting yourself or anyone else. This recurring theme of “I hate this person because they do what they want with their body” is getting old and annoying. Believe what you will regarding religion and morals and what is right or wrong or whatever you want to believe in, but the second you start turning your story into a commentary on the decisions and beliefs of other people, you’re in the wrong. There are other, more creative reasons to make your characters hate each other than their sexual activity.

Forgetting The First Times

One of the most exciting parts of being a teenager is that everything you’re experiencing, you’re experiencing for the first time. Everything is confusing and exciting and 10x more painful or memorable or enjoyable, and that’s neglected all the time in YA. I don’t mean the common trope of the first kiss or the losing of virginity. I mean love and infatuation and loss and heartbreak; it’s all happening to them for the first time in their lives, and these events make up their memories that they will carry with them forever. Teenage years are incredibly heavy times for people. It is, after all, the years in which they learn the most and the fastest and where the majority of their brain development takes place. These moments that you’re writing, the first kiss, the first time having sex, the first time your character loses someone they love, they’re all going to determine how your character will develop in the future. Treat them that way. Teach young readers that it’s normal and perfectly okay to be scared and inexperienced and lost. That’s the bitter-sweet part of youth and it’s beautiful.

Bad Boys And Boring Girls

Bad Boys are, in reality, bad news. The real “bad boys” in this world are slimy, manipulative jerks who trick girls (usually more than one at a time) into thinking they have feelings for them, using them for things like sex or money, and then either end up controlling their entire lives, introducing drugs and problems, or breaking their hearts. It’s sad, but it’s reality. Yes, there’s always a cause for this behavior, and sometimes these bad boys grow out of it, but that’s not always the case. Portraying these bad boys as “changeable” is not only dangerous for the female readers but also the men in their future. If you make girls think that they can change whomever they’re with to be the perfect prince charming, they will never be satisfied with someone who is flawed (spoiler alert: everyone is flawed) and they may destroy the self-esteem of whoever they’re with by making them think they need to change to be lovable.

Boring Girls are, sort of, connected to bad boys in this sense. They show up in every story, which makes sense financially because authors who make more relatable main characters sell more books. It’s just demographics. But at the same time, this stretch for a wider audience can end up influencing girls’ expectations of themselves and their love lives. If you make every protagonist completely boring, compliant, and devoid of strong, defining traits, girls will take that as advice. They will learn that all a girl has to do to make people fall in love with them is sit quietly and be pretty, which is horrible, in case you hadn’t noticed. Teach girls to look up to strong characters with rich personalities. Nowadays, that counts as an original idea.

Generalization

Portraying every aspect of teenage life and teenagers themselves as if you opened a book full of cliches, closed your eyes and pointed at something is not ok. High schools and families and personalities are different wherever you go, and making blind generalizations about aspects of teenage life can not only change how your reader interprets their own lives, but how adult readers assume teenage life is when they’re not around. It is important to not reinforce the assumption that there is always a popular clique and mean jocks and awkward nerds and dead-beat stoners because these stereotypes are a way for people to justify their snap-judgements, and not only does that say a lot about you as an author, but that will breed a whole new generation of judgmental, close-minded people.

Glorification Of Unhealthy Relationship Behaviors

I’m gonna say this once: It is not “hot” to have the love interest constantly putting restrictions on their supposed loved one. It’s not okay to borderline stalk someone and use “I love you” as an excuse, even if the person reciprocates your feelings. It is unhealthy to ignore someone when they say “no, no, not now” or “no, stop, not here” when you’re in the middle of initiating sex or even just kissing. It is disgusting when romance, especially YA Romance, which has mostly young, impressionable readers taking in your messages, promotes these behaviors like they’re something to strive for. Like it or not, your writing is going to alter the way they imagine a “perfect” relationship. If you aren’t willing to take that responsibility seriously, you should not be writing YA, and especially not YA Romance.

Support Wordsnstuff!

FIND MORE ON WORDSNSTUFFBLOG.COM

If you enjoy my blog and wish for it to continue being updated frequently and for me to continue putting my energy toward answering your questions, please consider Buying Me A Coffee, or pledging your support on Patreon.

Request Resources, Tips, Playlists, or Prompt Lists

Instagram // Twitter //Facebook //#wordsnstuff

FAQ //monthly writing challenges // Masterlist

MY CURRENT WORK IN PROGRESS (Check it out, it’s pretty cool. At least I think it is.)

Check out my YouTube Channel!

[queen-of-my-goofball-army]

New OC time!!

Meet Arashi Mitsuha. His quirk is that he can control the weather around him, he can summon thunder and lightning, turnados, tsunami’s basically any type of weather he’s your guy.

Appearance: He has Howl’s hair from Howl’s Moving Castle when it goes black and stormy blue eyes that Denki is constantly getting lost in. He also has double earrings two studs in his ears one of them Denki buys for him it’s a pair of thunderbolts.  

A: What are/were this character’s best subjects in school? Arashi loves science!! He absolutely loves to learn about how weather patterns work funnily enough since that is his quirk. It’s one his main special interests and he loves to learn about how the weather works. 

B: Do they have any allergies? He isn’t allergic to anything actually but he isn’t the best at dealing with other people and tries his best to get through the day. 

C: Can they swim well? Shi loves to swim!! It’s one of his favorite things to do, he’s actually really great at it. 

D: How do they react to being flirted with? He is not good when it comes to being flirted with (which ends up very bad for him when he meets Denki because let’s be honest here there isn’t a more flirty boi in class 1-A). He blushes just about every time Denki so much as winks at him let alone if he actually flirts with him he’ll be praying for a quick and painless death. 

E: How are they with children? He has a younger sister that he loves more than anything at all and she is the light of his world. At least before Kaminari comes into his world with memes and jokes and a flirty wink. 

F: What’s one thing they’re really bad at? He is really bad with names, he can’t remember names to save his life so most of the time he’ll wind up repeating their names until he becomes more comfortable around them to remember their names.

G: How do they flirt? When Arashi does flirt it’s usually in the honest way, he’ll tell Denki that loves the look in his eyes when he’s really passionate about something (it never fails to make Kaminari’s day though when he does flirt.)

H: What is their deadly sin? His deadly sin is probably gluttony, he has a second stomach for sweets and desserts and Denki loves to tease him about it (Isn’t that your second helping of strawberry cake? Shuddup this is rewelly good he says with his mouthful.)

I: On a scale of 1 to 10, how much do they love themselves? On a scale of one to ten he loves himself at a solid seven. He’s a little bit lonely but he knows that he is happy with the way that his life is. Or at least he thought that he was until our favorite electric boy came into his life. 

J: What’s their sense of humour like? His sense of humor is something that Denki loves, it’s a lot of word humor and verbal jokes. He loves to laugh at pretty much everything that his boyfriend does and sometimes it has resulted in him being stunned stupid more often than not. 

K: How do you know when you’ve upset them? He will probably yell at you which is rare but he has the temper of a thousand thunderbolts. He gets easily peeved when you insult one of his friends or his boyfriend for that matter. 

L: What is their favourite board game? He loves puzzles if those count as board games and frames his favorite ones in his dorm room after glueing all the pieces together. 

M: What is their favourite dessert? He is obsessed with cheesecake of all kinds though his favorite is lemon with blueberry syrup on top. 

N: What do they usually eat for breakfast? His go to breakfast is usually just a piece of fruit since he isn’t very hungry in the morning. 

O: What would it take to break them, inside and out? For Denki to leave him for another person (he hates watching him flirt with other people it makes him want to puke and it’s a long standing argument between the two of them at first. It takes Kaminari a little while to learn to rain it in and save the flirting for his boyfriend.) 

P: How do they handle money? He is very professional when it comes to money (until he sees a cute weather themed thing, stuffed animal or astronomy thing for his dorm room)

Q: Are they patient? I think that when your boyfriend is Denki Kaminari you are going to need to be a very patient person to put up with all the jokes and memes. 

R: What are their hands like? His hands have little scraps and calluses on them from using his quirk too much growing up

S: How stealthy are they? He tries to be stealthy but in reality he sucks at it. He also can’t keep a secret to save his entire life

T: Where are they ticklish? He is ticklish literally everywhere and Denki loves to get into tickle fights with him 

U: What’s their voice like? He has a naturally soft voice until you get him passionate about something “Hey Amasawa, what’s the weather like today? Well if you really want to know it’s sunny with a chance of clouds but it shouldn’t turn into anything too bad and you just wanted to hear me ramble again didn’t you Kaminari? What can I say it’s cute!!” (This is before they started dating he would mutter into his pillow about how he called him cute for the rest of the day. 

V: What’s the easiest way to annoy them? The easiest way to annoy him is to sneak into their room and use their computer without asking, his sister does it all the time.

W: Can they dance? He can dance actually and it’s something that he loves doing!! He’s always loved the feeling that he gets with a pair of tap shoes on.

X: What’s their most petty little secret? His most petty little secret is that he has a collection of Kaminari’s hoodies because they smell like him and during the longer nights when he can’t sleep and his boyfriend can’t be there he’ll pull one of them on and just breathe in deep. 

Y: What is one question they’ve always wanted an answer to? The one question that he has always wanted the answer to is why his dad left him when he told him about his sexuality. He had always known that he was gay from a young age but didn’t truly start to crush until his first boyfriend before Kaminari who didn’t treat him right and made him really self conscious of his hobbies. 

Z: How do they sleep? Arashi has a hard time sleeping if he isn’t wrapped up protectively in Kaminari’s arms with his own personal heater. Without him he’s really cold and he can’t get a full night's rest if he isn’t warm enough. Eventually Denki buys him a weighted blanket with clouds on it and it makes the nights where he isn’t there a lot easier.

1. Do they sleep with a stuffed animal? He has a bunch of weather related stuffed animals (A puffy big white cloud that he also uses as a pillow, a shooting star with a rainbow, a shining sun and a snowflake that he loves.)

2. Can they take care of a plant? What about a pet? What about a child? He has a cat named thunder and a dog named lighting back at home and thunder comes with him to the dorms since Vlad let’s him come. 

3. Ask them to describe their love interest. Shi would describe Denki as his beam of sunlight constantly shining down on him. He’s the optimist that he never knew that he needed until he literally came crashing into his life. He loves his bright and sunny personality. It doesn’t mean that he can’t fall or that he doesn’t have anxiety and he’s had to learn how to make studying more interesting so that he can pass his classes. They bonded over a shared love of music together and he learned that he doesn’t have to be shy with the things that he loves. He would also describe Kaminari as underrated. He’s not just a flirt or a perv but a person with a really big heart who would do anything for the person that he loves. Most of the time he lovingly describes Denki as a golden retriever puppy much like lightning that he misses back at home. 

4. Do they look good in red? He actually loves the color red, his favorite sneakers are that color and he has to wear red reading glasses (he has to wear them anyways but he wears contacts most of the time. Denki always loves when he wears his glasses because he thinks that they look adorable on him and that he should wear them more often.) 

5. Speech! Speech! Speech! Speech! It would be a late night one where Denki had a really bad day in class when Jiro had accidentally gone too far with a joke telling him that he was so lame that Ari would eventually learn that he was way above his pay grade date wise and that he deserved better. Ari would put his arms around him and be the big spoon for once because he knew it was exactly what his boyfriend needed. He would tell him how much he loved him for the first time that night, that he was the light of his life and that he wouldn’t be nearly as happy without him in his life. 

6. Who will they take advice from, no matter what it is? Who won’t they take advice from, no matter what it is? Arashi would always take advice from his mother and his younger sister (who while she might be six is wiser than most would expect her to be. Her quirk is that she has the ability to give the perfect puppy dog eyes that her brother is weak towards, she’s actually quirkless but she jokes that it’s her special quirk that nobody has ever heard of before.) His mom gives the best advice in the entire world and she always knows just what to say to make him feel a lot better. He would never take advice from his homophobic father who left when he came out to him when he was 10. 

7. Describe them in three words. Now let them describe themselves in three words. I would describe Arashi as relentlessly kind, quirky and just an all around incredible boyfriend. He would describe himself as an overly romantic nerd, somebody who can tell you the type of weather to expect everyday by smelling the sky but who still watches the weather and somebody who loves to laugh. 

8. Do complex puzzles intrigue or frustrate them? He absolutely loves puzzles!! To him the perfect day is cuddling with Denki, watching movies or playing video games, working on a puzzle and sharing earbuds with his boyfriend. 

9. Do they empathize with non-sentient things (dolls, plants, books…)? Ari has a special attachment to his shooting star stuffed animal because it was something that his grandma gave to him when he left for the dorms and he loves it more than anything. 

10. What age do they most want to be right now? He wants to stay the age that he is in the prime and happiness of his youth, spending time finally enjoying his teenage years with his starlight. 

11. They’ve won the lottery. Spend, or save? Spend it on a new and bigger television so that him and Denki can snuggle in front of a bigger screen.

12. Do they like romance in the books they read (or in the book they’re in)? He is the first to admit that he loves Fruits Basket like a lot. It's his favorite manga that he collected all of the collectors volumes and the one good thing to come out of his last relationship that ended with a lot of emotional abuse ironically. He had wanted a boy like Kakeru when he had read the manga and little did he know that his ball of chaos and energy was out there waiting for him. 

13. Name one thing their parents taught them. His mom taught him about the idea of soulmates which she eventually found in his stepdad whom he adores. His stepdad taught him that it was okay to be who you are and that having passions is okay as well.

14. Would they agree with the term ‘guilty pleasure’? He could watch the same weather report over and over until he’s tired of it. He loves learning about the weather and the way that the stars work and the way that everything comes into place in the universe. 

15. What would they consider a waste of time– other than school or work? Arashi has a problem with turning his brain off so that he can relax. Denki loves to calm him down with warm cuddles and a soft voice to get him relaxed. Also making him laugh is a surefire way to get him all chilled out and putty in his hands. 

16. If money wasn’t a limit, what would they wear? He would probably wear the same thing that he always does, he has a soft spot for jeggings and quirky shirts but Denki made him this leather jacket that says I’m your weatherman that he loves. It’s black and has a cartoon sun with a raincloud, a rainbow to celebrate his pride as gay and a snowflake to show that he’s different

17. Do they like children? He loves children!! He always is willing to babysit his baby sister whenever his mom needs him to so that she can go out for date night with his stepdad. 

18. Kissing: tongue or no tongue? He actually has learned to love all types of kissing!! Before Denki he hated kissing his ex-boyfriend because it just never felt right. When Denki first kissed him he could feel literal zings of electricity that he at first thought was because of his quirk but after talking with Mitsuki he learned that everyone just felt that way when they were with a person that they loved. 

19. Do they study before tests? Practice before job interviews? She always has this need to study for tests even though everyone around her encourages that she’ll ace it with flying colors because she is just naturally highly intelligent. 

20. What do they like that nobody else does? Nobody listens to the weather report, at least not unless they have anything else to do that day like a trip to an amusement park or a date day and the forecast has been all over the place all week. 

21. What would it take for them to break up with someone? What would be the last straw? Once they got over their anxieties and confessed their love to each other about six months into their relationship nothing can tear them apart. 

22. Do they like being called pet names? Do they call other people pet names? What’s their go-to? Oh god these two are literally the pet name couple. Denki: Babe, baby, sweetheart (that’s Ari’s Favorite and he uses it all the time), sunshine which is Denki’s favorite, darling and sugar. Arashi: Starshine is his favorite but also uses hun, love, goofball in the loving way, he’ll call him his prince if he’s feeling like teasing him just a little bit. 

23. Stability or novelty? Stability all the way. 

24. Safety or possibility? Safety, he’s always been apprehensive of the unknown and it gives him lots of anxiety. With Denki around it gets a lot better and he’s a lot more open to the idea of possibility and going with the flow.   

25. Talent or effort? Effort all the way. He has always been the one to try their hardest at everything that they did and even if it meant that he exhausted himself he still loved trying his best. 

26. Forgiveness or vengeance (or…)? Forgiveness. 

27. Would they date a fixer-upper? He would date a fixer upper!! His favorite movie growing up was Beauty And The Beast and that movie is perfect for showing that love is about what you see on the person inside rather than looking at their physical features. 

[davewakeman]

5 Reasons Many Businesses Find Themselves Struggling or Worse...

Originally published on Medium. 

I’ve been doing a private workshop with some of my clients over the last year and it has led me to see a pattern develop in businesses, big and small, successful and unsuccessful.

This pattern can typically be distilled to 5 core reasons that feed into each other into a downward spiral of outcomes that slow or stop revenue growth, limit profitability, and increase stress.

Those 5 signals usually follow this pattern:

First, the business lacks focus.

Due to the lack of focus, the business becomes too tactics driven.

Because the business is largely driven by tactics and “ideas”, all opportunities become good opportunities.

Fourth, because there is no consistency or rhythm to the way opportunities are focused on, there is little to no follow-through or accountability.

Finally, because of all of these factors, the business feels like it’s in control of you and your team not the other way around and this only continues because there are never any plans to check-in on your strategies, check-up on the business, or review where you are against your goal.

Re-feeding the cycle.

Let me explain all of this a little further.

Lack of focus:

We can call this whatever you want: objective, vision, mission, or the idea that drives your business.

To me, I’m reminded of the idea from Alice in Wonderland that, “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.”

This is why lack of focus is so harmful to a business.

You need to know your destination.

Not because you should be sitting around spending weeks and months compiling a complex strategy book, but because when you make a decision about what to focus on and what not to focus on, you need to have a lens.

A lot of folks have been talking about the art of strategy is to cull the things that aren’t your business away so that you can focus on the important stuff.

I’ll add my name to that chorus, but let me repeat the idea for fun: to gain focus for your business, you first have to decide what to ignore because there is always going to be something new and shiny to distract us from the important things we should be doing.

So my question to you is: what are you going to stop doing? Ignore? Or, make the core idea or focus of your business?

Becoming too tactics driven:

Remember the idea from Alice in Wonderland I shared above?

This second challenge is the embodiment of that idea.

Simplifying it is easy: if you don’t take a few moments to define what you want your business to become, you are unlikely going to be able to make the best possible decisions for your business.

Let me explain it to you in a different way.

Have you ever tried to put together a jigsaw puzzle and not started with the borders?

It is pretty much a given that you are not going to progress as fast as you should, if at all. It is pretty much a given that you are unlikely to complete the puzzle because eventually, you’ll get frustrated. Or, eventually, you relent and start figuring out the boundaries.

I make this analogy because think about strategy as the borders of the business.

If your business doesn’t have any borders, you can never get your business pointed in the right direction, aimed at the right targets, and moving forward.

What fills the gap of having a border?

Tactics!

All of those new, incredible ideas that will really put you in the right position to be successful.

The challenge is, as soon as you start taking action on them, you have nothing to measure them against, no sense of why they are the right actions for your business at this point, and whether or not it is going to have a positive impact on your business’s performance.

So…eventually you start the process all over again with a new shiny tactic.

All opportunities become good opportunities:

The ultimate end point here is you become a business defined by all of the ideas you have that can create value for your market.

In other words, every opportunity is a good opportunity.

I don’t know exactly which cliche fits this example best, but I think you can start by saying: you can’t be everything to everyone.

If you go back to the top and focus, you recognize that your business has to be one of culling away things that will distract you.

You have to do this.

In my workshops, I say that you should have ideas constantly, but you should also have a filter to pass those ideas through so that you can tell whether each idea is:

a good idea that you should take action on now

a good idea that doesn’t work now but does have a spot in your business later

a good idea but not one that you see a fit for in your business

a bad idea

This filter is what strategy and focus give you.

No follow through and no accountability:

All of the above ideas lead to one thing, no follow-through and no accountability.

The reasoning here is pretty simple.

Your business lacks direction. Your team doesn’t have focus. You are likely caught up in the day-to-day activities of keeping the business moving and so you are totally busy.

Busy, but not productive.

Without a foundation to look through, you are likely to continue to be “busy” and not productive.

The lack of focus continues to cascade through your business.

Don’t plan for check-ins, check-ups, or reviews:

The endpoint here of all of these building steps is that you never really know where your business is.

You may know what the revenue looks like or the sales numbers look like. You might even be able to compare them to last year’s numbers.

But what do they really mean?

Are they great? Good? Bad?

Compared to what?

Without an understanding of your businesses direction, focus, and goals, you don’t know where anything should or should not be, so you just don’t measure it.

You might say something like, “we’ve got a revenue goal to meet” and let’s think of how to do it.

And, you’ll come up with a bunch of different ideas that will all give the business a sugar high but won’t lead to sustained success.

More likely than not, you’ll end up just starting over from the top again.

How do you flip this idea around?

Shortly:

You spend some time thinking through what you want your business to be. Jot it down in the form of a sentence or two.

Make sure you set some goals and strategies that will support your vision.

Put your tactics together based upon your goals with the lens being this will or won’t move us closer to success.

Set tactics with timelines and accountabilities.

Schedule regular check-ins, check-ups, and reviews of your vision, strategies, and tactics to make sure you are working on the things you should be working on, that things are getting done, and figuring out if you are still working on the right things.

You want to learn more about this or how I walk businesses through it? Send me an email at dave@davewakeman.com and we can chat.

Please follow and like us:

5 Reasons Many Businesses Find Themselves Struggling or Worse… was originally published on Wakeman Consulting Group

[may-shepard]

surviving (and maybe even thriving) in the sherlock fandom after s4

...OR, maybe even kind of sort of learning how to enjoy oneself again while being a johnlocker.

This is a post for people who are on the fence / still turned off by s4 / still struggling with how to frame it for themselves. 

In light of the upcoming fic writers’ retreat, in anticipation of (I hope) having a conversation or two about this very topic, and in partial response to comments that my good fandom friends have dropped recently about their struggles with feeling like they don’t want to engage with the show or the fandom after s4, I’ve been thinking about how to continue on as a johnlocker, and why I feel more motivated than ever to find a way to have a relationship with the show (albeit a substantially altered one than before), and what fandom engagement means to me. 

It probably doesn’t look like it, because I’ve participated full throttle in all kinds of conversations about the show since s4, but I do get why s4 was entirely offputting for a lot of people. While I strongly suspect that mofftiss are doing something interesting and unusual with s4, that whatever-it-is came at a heavy price: a series that looks like a hot fucking mess and actively does things that one should never do (i.e., constantly throwing into question the reality status of the story one is telling) if one wants to avoid frustrating the shit out of one’s audience. 

What’s worse, the series was promoted with a promise of FINALLY answering the question of who Sherlock loves, without delivering on that promise in a way that was in any way definitive (John? Molly? Irene? Chips?) or satisfying (JOHN???). We got a scene that was really close to the kind of thing we’ve always wanted to see, at the end of The Lying Detective, an episode that also brought us an interaction between John and Sherlock that was so awful, it singlehandedly ruined the show for a lot of people. 

Even though I love the shit out of talking about the puzzle of s4, I love it because I love how smart everyone in the fandom is, and how much I’ve learned about Doyle, and the many many intertexts the show engages with. I love how stunningly great people here are with teasing complex arguments out of this hot mess. 

I don’t love that we got this weird thing to figure out instead of actual story. I don’t love that for some reason a major plot point was John and Sherlock detonating their relationship even more profoundly than they had before. I still think that the more skillful thing to do would have been to make a puzzle for viewers to figure out, but make it actually enjoyable to watch. (Personally, I did enjoy TLD, but I’m a sucker for Nick Hurran’s direction, I thought Ben and Martin performed incredibly, and I have a high tolerance for creepy shit and violence, so.)

SO: WHAT TO DO?

I’ve been thinking about a few of the strategies I’ve put in place / fallen back on for approaching all of this. I don’t know if any of this is helpful but here it is, for what it’s worth.

Acknowledge that the showrunners are human people and human people make good choices and bad choices and questionable choices

Before s4 aired, I wrote about the fact that mofftiss had set up a highwire act with extraordinarily high stakes, as of the end of s3. This meant they could pull off an astounding feat of storytelling, or they could fall. Instead they sort of burned down the circus tent and re-encoded all the elephants...not what any of us were expecting. I mean, surprises in storytelling can be great, but this was like hey everyone, suddenly the show is going to be performed in Esperanto instead of English, have fun with that.

Questionable at best.

To sum up: good choices resulted in the following:

Ben and Martin in s1 and 2 creating this beautiful dynamic together, eyesex and all the subtext and a tragic love story with mistakes and denial and pining and hope. s3, which bumped up the subtext to the point of ridiculousness. And TAB, which doubled down on that subtext EVEN HARDER. The purple shirt of sex and the swishy coat of alone protects me and a stalwart and broken John who is finally strong enough to partner his Sherlock and enough sexual and romantic tension to drown the population of the earth planet and a Mary Morstan who is actually Moran and there’s always two of us and hey did I mention romance yet?

We got all that, and then we got--this s4 thing.

Let me tell you about writers (speaking as one). They shit the bed all the time. They make weird choices. They have strange ideas. They fail to stick the landing. When that happens, it’s their tragedy. It doesn’t have to be yours. 

Maybe this story isn’t done yet. I don’t think it is. I’m willing and able to reserve judgement, but this post is for those of you who aren’t, or can’t. 

You can still like the parts of the show that you liked before. You weren’t wrong for liking what worked for you before. You would not be wrong now, for still liking those bits. All the shitty choices the showrunners could make, did make, and might still make, do not make you wrong for liking the bits you liked.

You can still like the parts of the show that you liked before. 

Need permission for that? Here it is: BECAUSE MAY SHEPARD SAYS SO. I’ll make you a certificate if you want. 

Need more specific help? Here’s another idea:

Get selfish. Get really, really selfish.

Remember that you are here for you. You came here, probably, because thinking about John and Sherlock together is something you enjoyed. Back immediately after s4 aired, and I was still stuck firmly in the wtf zone, I had to have a talk with myself about this. 

I asked myself what I liked about the show. Why John and Sherlock, together, were so crunchy and beautiful to me. It came down to one thing: the fact that I read the show as a love story. 

I’m here for my own entertainment. This is my happy place. This is where I come when my regular writing is stuck or I want to try to hack out a new part of my skill set. I get a lot out of thinking about John and Sherlock, as characters.

I still read the show as a love story, and I will continue to do so.

That means, in light of s4, doing a lot more reading in to the little moments than I used to have to. It means cherry picking a lot harder. It means ignoring vast swaths of what we actually saw onscreen. (The fact that this is the current state of meta too helps a whole heck of a lot.) 

Playing the what if game a lot harder than I have previously has become the rule of the day. 

What if John and Sherlock are in love? They are. For me, they are, and they always will be. Will they be in canon? Get yourself to a place where this question doesn’t matter, where your personal happiness doesn’t hang on this. We’re several months on after s4. It’s time to give your head a shake and remember that John and Sherlock love each other and will always find their way back to each other, because we say so. 

If you don’t believe this, try because May Shepard says so. I’ll say it until you believe it, too: John and Sherlock are in love. The show is a love story.

I will read the show as a love story, regardless of whether it wants me to. Hey show, get ready for some sweet sweet interpretation. I hope you’re in the mood.

Still not convinced? Try this thought experiment:

Put Some Distance Between You and S4

So a few nights back I was chatting with @laughing-at-the-darkness​ (who is the best, go follow her immediately), and I jokingly said that what we need in this fandom is a reset, like the kind of perspective you can only get ten years after a television show has finished airing. 

Try this on for size:

The year is 2027. You’re looking for some good content to watch. You remember hearing, dimly, about the fact that, a while back, BBC made a Sherlock Holmes adaptation with some pretty famous actors. 

You read about it a bit first. Ah yes: the adaptation that everyone was raving about, but that did a weird thing in its fourth series. Bearing this in mind, you decide to watch. 

You’re charmed by series 1-3, and the one-off Victorian special. You decide to watch s4, bearing in mind what you know about it, that it seemed to go off the rails relative to everything that had come before. You watch, prepared to laugh along at Mary’s bullet tango and the way she just won’t seem to go away and Sherlock has a sister who is also an X-Man? What???? 

You watch it. You shrug. You carry on thinking that s1-3 and TAB are great, like you were prepared to do. 

We know what we know now: that s4 is a difficult part of canon, a stumbling block for a lot of us. If you can accept that, then you can move forward, liking the parts you like, and leaving the parts you don’t.

Moving On

I still personally have some questions about how to deal with s4 as a fic writer. There are so many potential interpretations--how does one go about sorting through the detritus? A lot of people don’t want to / can’t bring themselves to rewatch, so how much can I assume they do and don’t remember about the episodes? But these are mostly logistical issues, and solvable with some rational decision making. (I did start a fic a while back based on TST, but I wasn’t ready to finish it, and I don’t think people wanted that type of fix it in that particular moment.) s4 changed the stakes for a lot of people, so writing fic now is all about writing to a different emotional register, I think. I’m personally having fun with that, while sorting through the implications for the wips I started before s4 aired. I’m hoping we can talk about some of these issues, as writers, and as fans, but that’s a post for another day.

In any case, I’m here, John and Sherlock are in love, and I hope this is helpful in some way. I don’t want anyone to lose the thing that used to give them enjoyment, nor (on a more selfish note) do I want to see people still leaving the fandom if they don’t have to. 

[getanattitude]

15 Weird Hobbies That'll Make You Better at best keyboard for learning piano

“THE more you dig into a bit of Ives, the greater pleasure you will get from it,” the pianist Jeremy Denk reported just lately, sitting at a piano within a rehearsal space for the Juilliard School. “It’s like fixing a puzzle.”

Then he enthusiastically deconstructed Ives’s “Concord” Sonata, untangling and describing the themes and motifs embedded in the complicated textures of this fascinating rating.

Mr. Denk is about to release a disc, “Jeremy Denk Plays Ives” (Assume Denk Media), featuring two piano sonatas, an esoteric selection of repertory for any debut solo album. But then, there's nothing generic concerning this adventurous musician. His vivacious intellect is manifest both equally in his actively playing and on his site, Consider Denk, an outlet for astute musical observations and witty musings, irrespective of whether a lament about inedible meatballs or even a spoof interview with Sarah Palin.

Mr. Denk will show his far more mainstream credentials when he performs Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. one with Charles Dutoit plus the Philadelphia Orchestra commencing on Thursday for the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia and on Oct. twelve at Carnegie Hall.

Mr. Denk argues that the Ives sonatas, composed early in the twentieth century, are mistakenly categorized as avant-garde performs as an alternative to “epic Passionate sonatas with Lisztian thematic transformations.” To your informal listener, the music that Mr. Denk describes inside the CD booklet as “good, inventive, tender, edgy, wild, primary, witty, haunting” can undoubtedly audio avant-garde. Ives, who built his living in the insurance plan organization, incorporated jazz, riffs on Beethoven and American hymns, marches and folk songs into his daringly experimental piano sonatas, rich in polytonality, thematic layering and rhythmic complexity.

“It’s so beautifully in-your-experience,” Mr. Denk reported, demonstrating a particularly maniacal passage in the “Concord” Sonata. “It’s also fairly incredibly unsightly. There is something maddening about his humorousness. Ives is constantly thumbing his nose at you in a means.”

But Mr. Denk suggests that Ives’s tenderness, which he illuminates beautifully in this recording, is underappreciated. “Ives is often about points recalled,” he reported, “or Recollections or visions fetched from some complicated spot.”

He performed the harmonically misty passages in the second movement from the “Concord,” wherever Ives directs that a piece of wood be pressed over the upper keys to generate a cluster chord. “It doesn’t experience gimmicky in the least to me,” Mr. Denk stated. “It’s all blues in the bottom. Ives realized the best way to use People little clichéd bits of Americana in a method that all of a sudden receives your gut. It is possible to’t consider how touching it really is.”

Mr. Denk, forty, continues to be keen about Ives due to the fact his undergraduate days at Oberlin in Ohio, wherever he carried a double important in piano overall performance and chemistry. “My total double diploma knowledge was to some degree of the constant freakout of one style of An additional,” he explained.

He had been a “genuinely nerdy high school university student” with a constrained social existence, he stated. “Ever considering that I used to be A child I desired to check out Oberlin and desired the liberal arts. Definitely I really get intense satisfaction out of drawing connections involving pieces and poems and literature and ideas.”

Mr. Denk explained himself for a “practice maniac,” but his horizons have extended much outside of the exercise place because Oberlin. Although nibbling an unlimited piece of chocolate cream pie at an Upper West Facet diner near the condominium he has rented given that around 1999, Mr. Denk referred to his website, calling it “an surprisingly superior outlet to launch tensions of 1 sort or An additional.” He stated it had drawn new listeners to his concert events. An avid reader of liberal political weblogs, Mr. Denk goals of writing a classical audio Variation of Wonkette, he said, but that would be difficult to do without the need of offending men and women. And he attempts to stay clear of offending individuals, he added, however he did not too long ago post a rant about method notes.

Mr. Denk, who calls himself “a true Francophile,” is tender-spoken but rigorous, his dialogue peppered with references to numerous “obsessions”: espresso, Ives, Bach, Proust, Baudelaire and Emerson.

He went off on “a Balzac mania” a few years back, he stated.

“That was a perilous time, and almost everything in life appeared drawn from a Balzac novel,” he additional. “I shed about three decades of my life to Proust. I’m confident it changed almost everything, which includes my enjoying.

“In the future my manager was like, ‘Dude, You need to center on your career and acquiring your stuff collectively.’ ” At that time, Mr. Denk said, “I had been bringing Proust to meetings.” He added: “I’m not sure I actually experienced a profession route. I had been just doing my weird thing, which most likely appeared like a disastrous nonroute to a lot of the folks who ended up watching more than me. I don't forget some exasperated conferences with my administration, However they had been extremely patient and devoted, which I’m insanely grateful for.”

Mr. Denk grew up in Las Cruces, N.M., considered one of two brothers, a son of songs-loving nonmusician mothers and fathers. His father, who may have a doctorate in chemistry, is (at different instances) a Roman Catholic monk plus a director of Personal computer science at New Mexico State College.

Mr. Denk remains addicted to the chili peppers of Las Cruces, he stated, seemingly only fifty percent joking: “The red along with the eco-friendly and The full spirituality of chili peppers. It’s even now a big A part of my everyday living. Once i go house I visit this serious dive and obsess more than their green meat burrito.”

When not on tour, Mr. Denk spends time together with his boyfriend, Patrick Posey, a saxophonist as well as director of orchestral functions and scheduling at Juilliard, where Mr. Denk received his doctorate, studying with Herbert Stessin. Mr. Stessin remembers having been amazed by “the maturity and depth” of Mr. Denk’s actively playing and remembers him as “a unprecedented scholar who absorbed items pretty rapidly.”

Mr. Denk said he “was in school eternally” until eventually “in some unspecified time in the future I made a decision to rely on my very own instincts.” Now he teaches double-diploma undergraduates with the Bard School Conservatory of New music. The pianist Allegra Chapman, who examined with him, said he was “concerned with a great deal greater than the notes to the webpage, always bringing up literary and historical references.”

“Now I attempt to method tunes in a additional holistic point of view,” she included. “He is very passionate. He accustomed to leap throughout the room and bounce about and wave his arms. It was genuinely pleasurable. He attempted to get me to think about the new music with a sense of humor.”

This combination of passion, humor and intellect, so vivid in both equally Mr. Denk’s taking part in and his composing, is exactly what distinguishes him, based on the violinist Joshua Bell. The 2 are actually regular duo associates considering the fact that 2004, when they performed at the Spoleto Festival United states.

“You get the intellectual musicians or people that don their heart on their own sleeve with no wide range of musical assumed,” Mr. Bell explained, “but Jeremy manages to accomplish both equally, and that’s best. Now we have an abundance of arguments in rehearsal, that's the pleasurable portion in addition. The fact we don’t usually see eye to eye retains factors refreshing and would make me issue anything I do.”

Mr. Bell, whose choices of repertory tend to be far more regular than Individuals of his much more adventurous colleague, reported he wasn’t normally an Ives supporter: “That has a good deal of recent audio I’m somewhat cautious. Despite Ives, right until I read Jeremy. He just provides it alive. He has these kinds of an awesome imagination, and nothing at all is done randomly.”

Ives’s piano sonatas, Mr. Denk explained, “are in a way like animals that don’t want to be tamed.”

“Just about every functionality should be so various,” he additional, a single explanation he was originally hesitant to report them. Like Bach, he reported, Ives leaves quite a bit towards the performer’s creativity.

A wonderful interpretation of your “Goldberg” Variations at Symphony House in 2008 uncovered Mr. Denk’s profound affinity with Bach. Mr. Denk will complete the perform and Guides one and a pair of of Ligeti’s Études at Zankel Corridor on Feb. sixteen.

To maintain the “Goldberg” Variants fresh new, Mr. Denk is incorporating new fingerings, he reported, “to reactivate the relationship in between my brain and my fingers when I’m playing it.”

“I think it’s an actual magical area When you've got the muscle memory,” he additional, “though the Mind is in advance in the fingers.”

Altering the fingerings is one method to stay clear of routine, he reported. “I get real enjoyment outside of crafting in an extremely excellent fingering. It's like relearning the piece, and it makes you not just take any Observe without any consideration.”

The musical philosophy Mr. Denk relates to Bach, Ives together with other repertory is probably most effective summed up in that site put up on application notes: “I’ve never ever been an enormous admirer on the ‘Think about how revolutionary this piece was when it was prepared’ faculty of inspiration. For my dollars, it ought to be groundbreaking now. (And it is actually.) Whichever else the composer may have intended, he / she didn’t want you to Feel, ‘Boy, that should are already interesting again then.’ The most basic compositional intent, absolutely the ur-intent, is you Enjoy it now, you help it become happen now.”

[whitewolfofwinterfell]

What Do u think About Bamon in general? Platonic or no?

I freakin’ love them. Here’s where you can read some of my thoughts about them (x) (x) (x). 

But yeah, I definitely ship romantic Bamon. It wasn’t an instant thing, they grew on me over the course of season 6, but their chemistry is just so incredible and it pulls me in every single time. I haven’t even watched the show since season 6, but the one thing I’ve watched consistently is Bamon scenes. I regularly check the tags and watch their videos on YouTube, because there’s something about them when they’re together…they just come alight. It’s such a different dynamic than any of the other relationships on the show and I see a completely different side to both of them when they’re with each other that I don’t see when they’re with anyone else. 

Plus, Bamon has just really made me love Damon’s character again. Way back in the early seasons Damon was one of my favourite characters, but between his constant pining and whining over Katherine and Elena I grew so tired of him. When he’s with Bonnie I see a Damon that I can get on board with. There’s a vulnerability and sincerity in him that Bonnie brings out. She makes him more aware of who he is, the things he’s doing, she makes him question that and makes him want to be a better person. He genuinely cares what she thinks of him and you can see that. He doesn’t want to let her down or disappoint her, but he’s consistently done that to everyone he loves so he pushes her way because she’s just too important and special for him to do that to her out of everyone. 

I see that lot of people don’t ship them or agree with them based on the fact that Damon has put Bonnie through a hell of a lot and they think she deserves better. I do understand why, but for me it just adds a new layer to their relationship by creating conflict and issues that they need to overcome. 

Here’s the honest truth of the matter: Damon is damaged. He’s so damaged that he doesn’t even seem to realise when he does something messed up, he’s just so used to following the same negative patterns of behaviour and no, it shouldn’t be a woman’s responsibility (or anyone else’s for that matter) to fix him, but it’s kind of inevitable that it has to happen. Damon needs help, he needs someone to be there for him, to remind him when he’s being an ass, to give him direction and guidance and support. What Damon needs is a strong, passionate woman that is mature, emotionally developed and capable of independent thought and that person is Bonnie. We saw what the writers did with D*lena, using Elena as Damon’s humanity and his morality and whether we like it or not, any Damon relationship whether it’s with Elena or Bonnie or Katherine or any other woman, will always have that aspect involved, because Damon needs that. But here’s the important part; with Bonnie it’s different. With Elena, Damon literally projected all of his issues directly onto her and used her as a catalyst for his humanity, but Elena never actually actively did or said anything to help Damon be a better person. Damon just convinced himself that she did because he wanted it to be true. But with Bonnie, she does. Like I said, she tells him when he’s doing something wrong, she’s not afraid to stand up to him, to reject his apology if she knows he’s in the wrong, but at the same time, she accepts that deep down he’s a good person that is trying to be better and she wants to help him do that. But what’s even more interesting is that just seeing Bonnie hurt by his actions is enough to make Damon remorseful and want to change. I don’t know if it’s just me, but I’ve never seen Damon react like that with Elena. When he hurts Bonnie it’s like he can’t stand it, it eats him up and it tortures his soul, but with Elena, he actually did things to deliberately hurt her. And I think evidence of this can be seen by the fact that when Elena had no memories in season 6 Damon said he didn’t want her to be happy, he wanted her to be as miserable as him. But what did he say to Bonnie in 8x10? “I hope it’s the happiest life, because you are an amazing woman.” See the difference? Damon is starting to show that he is capable of selfless love with Bonnie, which is something we’ve never really seen from him before. 

As for Bonnie, despite the utter crap she’s had to put up with from Damon, he’s good for her too. I think Bonnie is the kind of character that needs a challenge, someone that’s going to keep her on her toes and Damon is that for her. But more than that, he protects her, makes her feel safe and I think that’s important for Bonnie, because she’s constantly put in the path of danger. And like I mentioned in a previous post, Damon is the first person that’s actually consistently put Bonnie first and treated her as an actual person. Bonnie has been constantly overlooked and mistreated across the entirety of the show and I think the biggest thing that I notice is that she’s perceived as a witch and a solution to problems, rather than just Bonnie. And even the people that are supposed to be her best friends never thank her or show their appreciation. In season 6, Damon was the first one that acknowledged everything Bonnie had done for him and everyone else, he actually challenged Elena (because she was making everything about her as always) and said that he wanted to save Bonnie for Bonnie. Damon stopped making everything about Bonnie about Elena or magic or anything else and he made it about Bonnie. That’s so important. When Elena was put into the coma she said to Bonnie to let her make this sacrifice so Bonnie could live and that she wanted to do it after everything Bonnie had done for her. No, Elena had no choice but to sacrifice herself for Bonnie because Kai created the spell and Damon decided he wanted to keep Bonnie alive for Bonnie. Bonnie deserves that so much. She deserves someone that loves her, that puts her first and Damon does. 

And putting all of the deep stuff aside, Bonnie and Damon just have such an amazing dynamic. They have fun, they tease each other and naturally bounce off one another. I mean, they spent three entire months together on The Other Side. That is approximately 2,190 hours they spent in each other’s company, with no one else to talk to but each other. Imagine how much they learned about each other, how well they got to know each other, the comfortableness they built up. Honestly, I don’t know many people that could spend that much time together alone and not develop a significant and intimate bond that becomes something romantic. Generally the thing that makes people fall in love is getting to know someone on a deeper level. Hearing them speak about their fears, their hopes, their dreams, their past, their likes and dislikes; seeing them in every state of being there is, first thing in the morning, when they’ve just got out the shower, the dark circles under their eyes because they haven’t slept for days because they’re nervous about something, when they’re tears streaming down their face and snot running down their nose, when they’re laughing hysterically and accidentally snort, when they’re singing along to a song and don’t know anybody’s listening. You get the idea. All of these things are what Bonnie and Damon saw when they were together for those three months. Having that kind of closeness, getting to know someone that deeply, seeing every side of them that there is…it nearly always leads to one or both of those people falling in love with each other. 

And that’s what I love about Bonnie and Damon. There’s so much development and depth there, yet at the same time such a lightheartedness. They have the domesticated, adorkable best friend side of their relationship, where they sit around doing crossword puzzles, making pancakes, Damon teases Bonnie about Mrs Cuddles, Bonnie teases Damon about his collection of 90s music. But they also have the angsty, complex, intricately messed up side of their relationship where they argue, challenge each other, hurt each other and even hate each other. When those two elements come together it creates such a beautiful and interesting dynamic. There’s just so much potential there with them, so much that could be done, so many intriguing aspects to their relationship, the possibilities and just endless and I think that’s what’s so exciting about Bamon.

[glamournews-blog1]

Vlada Tabachuk - Startup Fashion Week

Startup Fashion Week - Vlada Tabachuk

Vlada Tabachuk is an incredibly talented designer, she is based in Toronto and will be showing a full collection of unique apparel at Startup Fashion Week Runway Show on Oct 25.  She is an incredibly talented designer 

DO YOU DESIGN YOUR OWN CLOTHES, OR YOU HAVE GO TO LABEL?

I’ve always liked to up-cycle clothes I already had to give them a second life but I rarely make my own clothes from scratch. I’m not really a patron of one particular label and I don’t really subscribe too much to trends. I like to shop around for items that I could see myself wearing forever. 

 WHEN DID YOU FIRST REALIZE YOU WANTED TO PURSUE A CAREER AS A DESIGNER?

I’ve always known this is what I wanted to do. My life has taken me on a lot of detours but I would always end up doing something fashion related. Once I made the decision to attend the Fashion Design Program at Ryerson University, I started to feel like I was exactly where I was supposed to be and after graduation I just kept trying to start my own brand until my team with an investor found me and approached me.

 ARE YOU SELF-TAUGHT OR DID YOU STUDY FASHION DESIGN?

I started sewing things when I was still a kid and tried to learn new techniques as I grew up. The DIY movement and creation of YouTube really helped me learn but I never felt that I could learn as much on my own as I could in a design program so I decided to get a degree from Ryerson University.

 WHAT OTHER SKILLS ARE IMPORTANT?

I think the most important skills in any work are the ability to network, ability to multitask, and the ability to adapt. To me networking is how I get inspired by others and how I continue to educate myself in what I do. Being able to multitask is crucial because as a new brand I am always hit with multiple things that are ALL priority and nothing can be put off until later. Lastly, it’s very important to be able to adapt to any changes that have to be made to the original plan when issues arise. My biggest motto through the whole process of starting my own brand when things would not go according to plan has been “Make it work!” (Tim Gunn from Project Runway)  

WHAT ARE YOU BIGGEST FEAR WHEN GOING OUT AND STARTING YOUR OWN LINE?

I can’t say there was ever a big fear of failure or disappointment when I was starting the brand with my business partners. Not to say that it wasn’t scary doing everything for the first time like registering a corporation, building a business plan, making big financial decision, creating mass production product etc. but I was never afraid of it turning out differently from how I expected. It’s rare that anything turns out how you expect so I went in ready to adapt and fail as many times as I needed until we figured it out.

WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE PART ABOUT BEING A DESIGNER?

My favourite part about being a designer is putting on some inspiring jams, spreading a clean piece of white paper on the drafting table and spending the following hours/days figuring out how a garment will be constructed, how every seam will interact with the fabric, how the construction and complexity will drape and interact with a body, how the construction will affect the costs and manufacturing time etc. It’s at this stage that I really get to submerge into my own mind and play with this giant puzzle of sorts.  

COULD YOU GIVE ME A DETAILED BREAKDOWN OF THE STEPS IN PRODUCING A COLLECTION...(FROM CONCEPTION TO THE RUNWAY)?

1. Come up with a concept and inspiration.

2. Do market and trend research.

3. Create a mood board that combines your ideas and what the market wants/needs for your collections season.

4. Sketch as many designs as are in your head following your moodboard as inspiration and consistency guide.

5. Choose your final designs and tweak them as needed to ensure they work together as a collection and that the construction of them will remain within your brand’s manufacturing cost bracket. 

6. Find your fabrics, trims, and hardware.

7. Create production documents necessary to create patterns for the garments.. 

8. Started creating garment patterns, testing each one out in muslin and then in actual fabric. At this stage some changes are often made to fabric choices and designs in order to improve the overall appearance and to decrease manufacturing costs where possible.

9. Once the patterns are created, additional manufacturing documents are created that include a record of material quantities per garment, costs, and specifications. They are used for the brand to communicate with manufacturers, calculate production costs, and come up with retail prices for the garments.

10. Create and order care tags, hang tags, size tags, and brand tags. 

11. Create double sample of each garment to use for photo shoots and promo while the manufacturer is producing the total quantity.

12. Plan and execute a look book shoot and create a stock of brand photos to use for social media and PR. 

13. PROMO! Reach out to your network to share news of your new collection; create exciting and interesting social media posts; go out and be seen/heard; reach out to media to make them aware of this awesome thing you just did and get them excited about your new collection.

14. Get ready for the runway: model try ons, runway moodboards for Hair and Make-up Artists, start stocking up on thank you cards and gift merch.

( I hope this isn’t too much! I tried to condense it to crucial steps.)  

HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOUR BRAND?

Project 313 Apparel is a luxury street wear brand that is heavily inspired by techwear through it’s use of fabrics, fit, and function. I like to create items that stand out through small design details and manufacture them in fabrics that are both eco-friendly and unbelievably soft to the touch.  

 WHERE DO YOU GO FOR INSPIRATION?

I find the most inspiration just wandering around busy the streets and observing. Toronto is a fantastic city for that because of the vast diversity in architecture, culture, people, styles, tastes, music. I got design on my mind and my mind on design 24/7 so it’s never hard to find inspiration. I can look at any object and visualize an article of clothing that reflects it’s vibes or aesthetic so Toronto is truly a never ending supply of inspiration.

  WHAT ARE YOU FASCINATED BY AT THE MOMENT AND HOW DOES IT FEED INTO YOUR WORK?

I am currently obsessed with exploring untraditional and challenging construction techniques. I am a glutton for a challenge. Our launching collection called Order x Chaos for Project 313 Apparel features some complicated style lines that are unconventional for hoodies and tees. It was a challenge to create an odd hood shape that looks like it sits on your shoulders but I love how it turned out. 

  HOW DO YOU WANT YOUR CLIENT FEEL WHEN WEARING YOUR CLOTHES?

We want the Project 313 Apparel customer to feel like they are draped in luxury and comfort when they are wearing our clothing. It is important to us that our clothes inspire confidence and become an extension of self. I think there is nothing worse (clothes related) than being constantly aware of what you are wearing because of a bad fit, uncomfortable fabric, or restricted movement that’s why Project 313 Apparel provides style that allows it’s wearer to be free to move.

   HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOUR PERSONAL STYLE?

I would describe my personal style as “always in transition”. Although I don’t generally follow trends and on average buy only 5 new fashion items every year, I am constantly trying to reinvent my style through finding new ways to wear the pieces I already have. So my style is essentially a rotation of basic with a few oddly patterned pieces. For example some of my favorites are: pants with floral water colour print from Banana Republic, a men’s button up with ice-cream pops I found at winners, a Clover Canynon pull-over sweatshirt with interior design CAD graphic. One day I will fully commit to funky patterns but for now I feel like my collection is just not big enough. 

 IF YOU WERE A SUPERHERO, WHAT KIND OF POWERS WOULD YOU HAVE?

If I were a superhero I would want the ability to clone myself like Dr Manhattan (without the public nudity) so that I could do more at the same time.  

 IN YOUR OPINION, WHICH SUPER VILLAINS NEEDS FASHION ADVICE?

If I had to pick one... Doc Ock is probably in the bottom 10. His costume is just a bit boring. He looks like a middle school math teacher, stuck on primary colors, who also forgot it was Halloween so he pulled together a last minute “zucchini” looking outfit. His outfit is just not fear inducing whatsoever so he would really benefit from a makeover. 

[jonathanbelloblog]

Lewis Hamilton Above the Noise

The chartered jet lands at Inyokern Airport just before noon on the Monday before Christmas. Formula 1 world champion Lewis Hamilton, just three weeks removed from the 2017 season finale and not two months since he clinched his fourth world title, disembarks from the rented plane along with a half dozen or so friends. Following a campaign that saw him win nine races to bring his career tally to 62 (second only to Michael Schumacher’s 91) and claim his 72nd pole position—the all-time record ahead of Schumacher’s 68 and the late Ayrton Senna’s 65—it’s a bit incongruous to see Hamilton hanging around this small desert airfield 145 miles northeast of Los Angeles. For the 32-year-old Briton, though, it’s the final stop on his 2017 work schedule after flying in from Los Angeles, where he spent several days in business meetings. Now, on his way to the Vail, Colorado, area, where he owns a ranch dubbed the “MegaZone,” his Mercedes-AMG employer has requested he make a detour from beginning his vacation in order to shoot some photos alongside his championship-winning race car and the company’s forthcoming Project One supercar. The company offered us a rare chance for some one-on-one time with the driver former McLaren teammate Jenson Button recently dubbed “the quickest guy that has ever driven a Formula 1 car.”

Automobile Magazine: What’s the big activity during your vacation?

Lewis Hamilton: Well, the next few days, we snowboard. We do snowmobiling. We do night paintballing in the snow. It’s just chilling out. A lot of gaming. We play a lot of video games, a lot of board games.

AM: Which video games are you into?

LH: “Call of Duty.”

AM: Not racing or car-related games?

LH: No, I don’t play those games much, really. The one I just played this year is the new “Gran Turismo,” which is sick. It’s really, really f****** good. It’s crazy to see because I had the first one, and to see it develop and how it is today, it’s super-impressive. I’ve got the steering wheel and a professional seat setup where we’re going today [in Colorado]. So we’ll have it set up, and we can play two-player. I’m excited about that.

AM: At this stage of your career, what do you think of the perception of you as portrayed by the traditional F1 press? You catch a lot of flak from European media for some of the things you do during your personal time, like jetting around the world to various events between races and hanging out with other celebrities, like Justin Bieber.

LH: I think it’s always been the case since I’ve been in Formula 1. There’s always been negativity, but, I mean, I generally don’t tend to focus on that. I think when I started to do these different things, people definitely commented on it and had opinions about it. Then they would say [I’m] not focused. It was a lot of work to kind of break the mold, break the shape of [what] people would expect a racing driver to be. This is a new day and age, and I’m the new. It’s not for others to decide what I am as a racing driver. It’s for me to discover and kind of watch it unfold. I think it’s been cool because I’ve been doing these different things and then I turn up and win, so they can’t say, really, anything. It’s just that I think we’re all a little different, and we should all strive to be different and shouldn’t shy away from it. But there are people in the world that tend to crawl into their shell and feel that they need to be a certain way because people expect them to be that way.

AM: Do you feel like you get more or less or the same amount of that criticism compared to in the past?

LH: I don’t know, and to be honest I don’t ever read the stuff. I really don’t care. Zero f**** is the term that I use. I know I’ve got my closest people around me. I’m still close to my family. Still have the same values as when I started out. Of course, people that tune in today, they see me at the top. They only see the success. They don’t see everything that I’ve done to be where I am today. People definitely don’t appreciate that. Some people don’t. I’m just trying to get in as much as I can in the time that I have whilst not losing performance. Then I have other things to move on to when I stop rather than being stuck where I currently am, which I would prefer not to be.

AM: Speaking of other things to do, your aunt died from cancer in 2012, and you’ve made a point before about how that impacted you …

LH: Definitely. We all go through some experiences that … they talk about building character and helping you prioritize and redirect your focuses. I think for me with my auntie, I think it was really [the case]. I mean naturally when someone tells you on their deathbed that they had been planning to do these things and then they’ve run out of time—I imagine how that is because a lot of people do that. My mom and friends have worked day in and day out and sacrificed things for the future, and then when you run out of road, you don’t get to do those things. It was definitely sad to see that, and just in that moment my auntie made me promise I was going to live life to the max and do everything and not hold back.

AM: How does that manifest with you?

Growing up in Stevenage, sitting with my mom and not having— We’d walk down to the bus stop to take a bus to town because we didn’t have a car. It’s just crazy to think I have cars now.

LH: Not wait until I’m 40 to go skiing. She was like, live in the now and not … obviously have a balance in the now and in the future, but live now, so for me that’s a massive highlight. That’s what I’m going to do. You just never know when … I’m still of the mindset you just never know when your day is up. A best friend of ours here today, her friend just got a call yesterday from the doctor saying that the friend only has one month to live. When that happens, what are you going to do? Hopefully that doesn’t happen to any of us, but it does happen in the world, and accidents happen, s***. I just want to know that if [my time is] cut short that I did everything up until that point in my life that I could.

AM: How do you manage to do all of the globe-trotting and other things you do between races yet still maintain peak performance in the car?

LH: I think I’m just used to it. My friends always say to me, “I don’t understand where you get the energy,” because I do usually have a lot of energy. I’m doing a lot of things. I think it’s really about how I’m able to switch off between the jobs or between racing. I can completely compartmentalize it, put it in the box, wait, close the drawer, wait until I need to focus on it. It doesn’t drain me.

AM: Is that a key point you’ve learned about human performance over the years?

LH: I guess it’s through trial and error. I’ve put tons of time into training [in the past] and then found it’s actually been worse for my performance if I don’t do anything else and only train every single day, with no other stimulation mentally. I perform worse [with that approach], so then it’s just about bit by bit taking it to here and dividing that 100 percent battery life you have. Dividing it a certain way across the different things that you plan on doing. Have some remaining so that you can use it for the racing. Do you know what I mean?

AM: In terms of dividing that energy, how much of your downtime is spent reviewing data from the racetrack?

LH: Yeah, yeah, that takes a lot of time. All the flights that I’m on, the long flights, I’m studying. When I’m in my hotel room, I’m studying. When I’m at the tracks, I’m studying. When I go back to the team’s factory, we’ll have a meeting, and they’re constantly sending me files and emails regarding car setup. All these different things, and we’ll go back and forth about setup, things we tested with, things that we might want to try. Then all the changes I make through the weekend. I wouldn’t say they use what I dictate, but I lead it. I make a general decision in that respect.

AM: Modern F1 teams collect so much data. How do you sort it all out in limited time?

LH: I have an engineer who’s got massive confidence in me. He knows there are times I come in and I’m like, s***, I’ve got four options of things to change. I’m not quite sure which ones they are, but this is my problem, or this [other thing] is my problem. Then we have that discussion; can we use that one or that one? The majority of the time, for like 90 percent of the time, I come in and I’m like, I need this. I’ve got this understood here. Change, you know, one [minor] setting lower or whatever it may be. That just comes with experience.

AM: Grand Prix cars are incredibly complex; is there one item in particular you absolutely have to get right every week?

LH: There’s not one point. There are so many pieces to the puzzle that have to come together. So tires are crucial, tire temperature, tire usage is of course crucial. [But overall] on-track setup is everything. It’s like, if I explain it like roads, you got a road that’s this length, this length, this length, and longer. You want to set the car up on the one that can go the furthest, basically, in terms of potential. You know what I mean? Sometimes you go on the wrong road with the setup and you limit yourself and you just can’t take it any further. Most times you just hit a wall, but if you get on the right path for the setup, it’s a longer … this is a really bad usage of terminology, but it’s a longer road, so you can really push the car further and expand more and extract more from it.

AM: Do you ever stop and look at your career, 11 years in, and think—surreal might not be the correct word here because everybody’s life is surreal in a lot of ways …

LH: Sure.

AM: But the reality is, your stats are piling up year after year, and you still appear to have a long way to go before you stop. Do you allow yourself to sit and smile about this stuff now, or are you saving those thoughts for when you’re finished in the sport?

Wild life: Hamilton’s Mercedes-AMG duties include assisting with development of the Project One. Despite his jet-setting schedule and an image criticized by some, we found him to be open and engaging during our informal chat.

LH: Yeah, I think for me, I think after I did the last race of 2017 and it just didn’t stop, there was no moment to stop. I just had days and days and days and days of PR events. I was at the factory, in the wind tunnel looking at the new car, the engineers talking to me about how the new car is going to be. Can’t stop for a second, really. Obviously now I’ll go away today and these next days I’ll be off for, so I’ll be sitting down, but I still don’t ever—of course when we talk about it, I’m like, it’s crazy how far we’ve come. But I don’t know. I think my ambition kind of overshadows it or clouds it because I’m just super-ambitious. Done one thing. I’m moving to the next thing. It’s just a tick, you know what I mean? It’s oh, wow, I’ve achieved it. It’s just now the next focus. It’s really, I’ve found a long-lasting game of chess, but there are lots of checkmates along the way.

AM: To your earlier point about maximizing every day, though, you do seem to absorb it as it happens, yes?

LH: You know I have a checkmate in lots of different things, moving to the next, what’s next, how can I better it? How can I grow? I’ve got so many things that I want to achieve, and the only question is—it’s not a question of if I can do it. It’s a question of time. I’m incredibly fortunate to do the things that I do. Look where we are today. I’m landing on the fricking plane this morning, and I’m thinking to myself, this just doesn’t seem real. It’s literally a fricking dream that I live. Because growing up in Stevenage, sitting watching a TV show with my mom and not having—we’d walk down to the bus stop to take a bus to town because we didn’t have a car. It’s just crazy to think I have cars now. It still doesn’t—even for my mom when she comes and sees the things that we have, even for her it doesn’t feel—it just feels weird. I don’t think I mentioned she had jobs and struggled so much. Now we do things, and it’s, I don’t know, it feels good, but it just feels very surreal.

AM: So that was the right word then.

LH: Every single day it feels surreal because it just doesn’t feel like it changes. I like that it does feel that way because if you get used to something, you get comfortable with something, then it’s easier to take things for granted. I don’t feel like my family generally does that, so that’s all about the people around you, grounded people. [I am] very, very, very careful who I select to be around me. I don’t have any weak-minded or negative individuals. I just get the most positive, lovely, real people around me.

AM: If you could talk to yourself at 10 years old and at 22 years old when you came into F1: Knowing what you know now and what you’ve experienced, what message would you deliver to those younger versions of yourself?

LH: I look back at myself, and I meet kids now that are so much more advanced than I was at their age. I was very, very timid, very, very much in a cocoon when I was younger. I didn’t hang around with kids on the weekends. I was super kept to myself, quiet. Yet I was still mischievous and outgoing and [a] daredevil. What I would just say to myself as a youngster and what I would like to do for my kid [one day] is ultimately, a human is like a plant growing, and you have to nurture the plant, you have to keep it watered and help it grow and give it light and those kind of things. Allow it to blossom in its natural form, and a lot of parents today … I’ve got cousins who are being pushed by their parent to do soccer, and often I think a parent’s job is to protect, but they can also be quite restricting. Or teachers or whatever, things force [kids] in an unnatural direction. What I’m saying is, for me I felt that I was held back when I was younger in terms of growing as a character, as a kid.

AM: Was that the system you were in, or … ?

LH: Just lots of things. It was school, it was pressures of not living a kid’s life—which I’m grateful that I went through, but I would just say I would somehow get the kid that I was and try and encourage him to be brighter and grow faster. By the time I really kind of grew into understanding who I was, I was frigging in my 20s, you know? There are a lot of 18-year-olds I see now or 17-year-olds who are so much more, who are already there, knowing what they want to do or knowing who they are, what kind of characters they are. So that’s great to see.

[eddiejpoplar]

Lewis Hamilton Above the Noise

The chartered jet lands at Inyokern Airport just before noon on the Monday before Christmas. Formula 1 world champion Lewis Hamilton, just three weeks removed from the 2017 season finale and not two months since he clinched his fourth world title, disembarks from the rented plane along with a half dozen or so friends. Following a campaign that saw him win nine races to bring his career tally to 62 (second only to Michael Schumacher’s 91) and claim his 72nd pole position—the all-time record ahead of Schumacher’s 68 and the late Ayrton Senna’s 65—it’s a bit incongruous to see Hamilton hanging around this small desert airfield 145 miles northeast of Los Angeles. For the 32-year-old Briton, though, it’s the final stop on his 2017 work schedule after flying in from Los Angeles, where he spent several days in business meetings. Now, on his way to the Vail, Colorado, area, where he owns a ranch dubbed the “MegaZone,” his Mercedes-AMG employer has requested he make a detour from beginning his vacation in order to shoot some photos alongside his championship-winning race car and the company’s forthcoming Project One supercar. The company offered us a rare chance for some one-on-one time with the driver former McLaren teammate Jenson Button recently dubbed “the quickest guy that has ever driven a Formula 1 car.”

Automobile Magazine: What’s the big activity during your vacation?

Lewis Hamilton: Well, the next few days, we snowboard. We do snowmobiling. We do night paintballing in the snow. It’s just chilling out. A lot of gaming. We play a lot of video games, a lot of board games.

AM: Which video games are you into?

LH: “Call of Duty.”

AM: Not racing or car-related games?

LH: No, I don’t play those games much, really. The one I just played this year is the new “Gran Turismo,” which is sick. It’s really, really f****** good. It’s crazy to see because I had the first one, and to see it develop and how it is today, it’s super-impressive. I’ve got the steering wheel and a professional seat setup where we’re going today [in Colorado]. So we’ll have it set up, and we can play two-player. I’m excited about that.

AM: At this stage of your career, what do you think of the perception of you as portrayed by the traditional F1 press? You catch a lot of flak from European media for some of the things you do during your personal time, like jetting around the world to various events between races and hanging out with other celebrities, like Justin Bieber.

LH: I think it’s always been the case since I’ve been in Formula 1. There’s always been negativity, but, I mean, I generally don’t tend to focus on that. I think when I started to do these different things, people definitely commented on it and had opinions about it. Then they would say [I’m] not focused. It was a lot of work to kind of break the mold, break the shape of [what] people would expect a racing driver to be. This is a new day and age, and I’m the new. It’s not for others to decide what I am as a racing driver. It’s for me to discover and kind of watch it unfold. I think it’s been cool because I’ve been doing these different things and then I turn up and win, so they can’t say, really, anything. It’s just that I think we’re all a little different, and we should all strive to be different and shouldn’t shy away from it. But there are people in the world that tend to crawl into their shell and feel that they need to be a certain way because people expect them to be that way.

AM: Do you feel like you get more or less or the same amount of that criticism compared to in the past?

LH: I don’t know, and to be honest I don’t ever read the stuff. I really don’t care. Zero f**** is the term that I use. I know I’ve got my closest people around me. I’m still close to my family. Still have the same values as when I started out. Of course, people that tune in today, they see me at the top. They only see the success. They don’t see everything that I’ve done to be where I am today. People definitely don’t appreciate that. Some people don’t. I’m just trying to get in as much as I can in the time that I have whilst not losing performance. Then I have other things to move on to when I stop rather than being stuck where I currently am, which I would prefer not to be.

AM: Speaking of other things to do, your aunt died from cancer in 2012, and you’ve made a point before about how that impacted you …

LH: Definitely. We all go through some experiences that … they talk about building character and helping you prioritize and redirect your focuses. I think for me with my auntie, I think it was really [the case]. I mean naturally when someone tells you on their deathbed that they had been planning to do these things and then they’ve run out of time—I imagine how that is because a lot of people do that. My mom and friends have worked day in and day out and sacrificed things for the future, and then when you run out of road, you don’t get to do those things. It was definitely sad to see that, and just in that moment my auntie made me promise I was going to live life to the max and do everything and not hold back.

AM: How does that manifest with you?

Growing up in Stevenage, sitting with my mom and not having— We’d walk down to the bus stop to take a bus to town because we didn’t have a car. It’s just crazy to think I have cars now.

LH: Not wait until I’m 40 to go skiing. She was like, live in the now and not … obviously have a balance in the now and in the future, but live now, so for me that’s a massive highlight. That’s what I’m going to do. You just never know when … I’m still of the mindset you just never know when your day is up. A best friend of ours here today, her friend just got a call yesterday from the doctor saying that the friend only has one month to live. When that happens, what are you going to do? Hopefully that doesn’t happen to any of us, but it does happen in the world, and accidents happen, s***. I just want to know that if [my time is] cut short that I did everything up until that point in my life that I could.

AM: How do you manage to do all of the globe-trotting and other things you do between races yet still maintain peak performance in the car?

LH: I think I’m just used to it. My friends always say to me, “I don’t understand where you get the energy,” because I do usually have a lot of energy. I’m doing a lot of things. I think it’s really about how I’m able to switch off between the jobs or between racing. I can completely compartmentalize it, put it in the box, wait, close the drawer, wait until I need to focus on it. It doesn’t drain me.

AM: Is that a key point you’ve learned about human performance over the years?

LH: I guess it’s through trial and error. I’ve put tons of time into training [in the past] and then found it’s actually been worse for my performance if I don’t do anything else and only train every single day, with no other stimulation mentally. I perform worse [with that approach], so then it’s just about bit by bit taking it to here and dividing that 100 percent battery life you have. Dividing it a certain way across the different things that you plan on doing. Have some remaining so that you can use it for the racing. Do you know what I mean?

AM: In terms of dividing that energy, how much of your downtime is spent reviewing data from the racetrack?

LH: Yeah, yeah, that takes a lot of time. All the flights that I’m on, the long flights, I’m studying. When I’m in my hotel room, I’m studying. When I’m at the tracks, I’m studying. When I go back to the team’s factory, we’ll have a meeting, and they’re constantly sending me files and emails regarding car setup. All these different things, and we’ll go back and forth about setup, things we tested with, things that we might want to try. Then all the changes I make through the weekend. I wouldn’t say they use what I dictate, but I lead it. I make a general decision in that respect.

AM: Modern F1 teams collect so much data. How do you sort it all out in limited time?

LH: I have an engineer who’s got massive confidence in me. He knows there are times I come in and I’m like, s***, I’ve got four options of things to change. I’m not quite sure which ones they are, but this is my problem, or this [other thing] is my problem. Then we have that discussion; can we use that one or that one? The majority of the time, for like 90 percent of the time, I come in and I’m like, I need this. I’ve got this understood here. Change, you know, one [minor] setting lower or whatever it may be. That just comes with experience.

AM: Grand Prix cars are incredibly complex; is there one item in particular you absolutely have to get right every week?

LH: There’s not one point. There are so many pieces to the puzzle that have to come together. So tires are crucial, tire temperature, tire usage is of course crucial. [But overall] on-track setup is everything. It’s like, if I explain it like roads, you got a road that’s this length, this length, this length, and longer. You want to set the car up on the one that can go the furthest, basically, in terms of potential. You know what I mean? Sometimes you go on the wrong road with the setup and you limit yourself and you just can’t take it any further. Most times you just hit a wall, but if you get on the right path for the setup, it’s a longer … this is a really bad usage of terminology, but it’s a longer road, so you can really push the car further and expand more and extract more from it.

AM: Do you ever stop and look at your career, 11 years in, and think—surreal might not be the correct word here because everybody’s life is surreal in a lot of ways …

LH: Sure.

AM: But the reality is, your stats are piling up year after year, and you still appear to have a long way to go before you stop. Do you allow yourself to sit and smile about this stuff now, or are you saving those thoughts for when you’re finished in the sport?

Wild life: Hamilton’s Mercedes-AMG duties include assisting with development of the Project One. Despite his jet-setting schedule and an image criticized by some, we found him to be open and engaging during our informal chat.

LH: Yeah, I think for me, I think after I did the last race of 2017 and it just didn’t stop, there was no moment to stop. I just had days and days and days and days of PR events. I was at the factory, in the wind tunnel looking at the new car, the engineers talking to me about how the new car is going to be. Can’t stop for a second, really. Obviously now I’ll go away today and these next days I’ll be off for, so I’ll be sitting down, but I still don’t ever—of course when we talk about it, I’m like, it’s crazy how far we’ve come. But I don’t know. I think my ambition kind of overshadows it or clouds it because I’m just super-ambitious. Done one thing. I’m moving to the next thing. It’s just a tick, you know what I mean? It’s oh, wow, I’ve achieved it. It’s just now the next focus. It’s really, I’ve found a long-lasting game of chess, but there are lots of checkmates along the way.

AM: To your earlier point about maximizing every day, though, you do seem to absorb it as it happens, yes?

LH: You know I have a checkmate in lots of different things, moving to the next, what’s next, how can I better it? How can I grow? I’ve got so many things that I want to achieve, and the only question is—it’s not a question of if I can do it. It’s a question of time. I’m incredibly fortunate to do the things that I do. Look where we are today. I’m landing on the fricking plane this morning, and I’m thinking to myself, this just doesn’t seem real. It’s literally a fricking dream that I live. Because growing up in Stevenage, sitting watching a TV show with my mom and not having—we’d walk down to the bus stop to take a bus to town because we didn’t have a car. It’s just crazy to think I have cars now. It still doesn’t—even for my mom when she comes and sees the things that we have, even for her it doesn’t feel—it just feels weird. I don’t think I mentioned she had jobs and struggled so much. Now we do things, and it’s, I don’t know, it feels good, but it just feels very surreal.

AM: So that was the right word then.

LH: Every single day it feels surreal because it just doesn’t feel like it changes. I like that it does feel that way because if you get used to something, you get comfortable with something, then it’s easier to take things for granted. I don’t feel like my family generally does that, so that’s all about the people around you, grounded people. [I am] very, very, very careful who I select to be around me. I don’t have any weak-minded or negative individuals. I just get the most positive, lovely, real people around me.

AM: If you could talk to yourself at 10 years old and at 22 years old when you came into F1: Knowing what you know now and what you’ve experienced, what message would you deliver to those younger versions of yourself?

LH: I look back at myself, and I meet kids now that are so much more advanced than I was at their age. I was very, very timid, very, very much in a cocoon when I was younger. I didn’t hang around with kids on the weekends. I was super kept to myself, quiet. Yet I was still mischievous and outgoing and [a] daredevil. What I would just say to myself as a youngster and what I would like to do for my kid [one day] is ultimately, a human is like a plant growing, and you have to nurture the plant, you have to keep it watered and help it grow and give it light and those kind of things. Allow it to blossom in its natural form, and a lot of parents today … I’ve got cousins who are being pushed by their parent to do soccer, and often I think a parent’s job is to protect, but they can also be quite restricting. Or teachers or whatever, things force [kids] in an unnatural direction. What I’m saying is, for me I felt that I was held back when I was younger in terms of growing as a character, as a kid.

AM: Was that the system you were in, or … ?

LH: Just lots of things. It was school, it was pressures of not living a kid’s life—which I’m grateful that I went through, but I would just say I would somehow get the kid that I was and try and encourage him to be brighter and grow faster. By the time I really kind of grew into understanding who I was, I was frigging in my 20s, you know? There are a lot of 18-year-olds I see now or 17-year-olds who are so much more, who are already there, knowing what they want to do or knowing who they are, what kind of characters they are. So that’s great to see.

[jesusvasser]

Lewis Hamilton Above the Noise

The chartered jet lands at Inyokern Airport just before noon on the Monday before Christmas. Formula 1 world champion Lewis Hamilton, just three weeks removed from the 2017 season finale and not two months since he clinched his fourth world title, disembarks from the rented plane along with a half dozen or so friends. Following a campaign that saw him win nine races to bring his career tally to 62 (second only to Michael Schumacher’s 91) and claim his 72nd pole position—the all-time record ahead of Schumacher’s 68 and the late Ayrton Senna’s 65—it’s a bit incongruous to see Hamilton hanging around this small desert airfield 145 miles northeast of Los Angeles. For the 32-year-old Briton, though, it’s the final stop on his 2017 work schedule after flying in from Los Angeles, where he spent several days in business meetings. Now, on his way to the Vail, Colorado, area, where he owns a ranch dubbed the “MegaZone,” his Mercedes-AMG employer has requested he make a detour from beginning his vacation in order to shoot some photos alongside his championship-winning race car and the company’s forthcoming Project One supercar. The company offered us a rare chance for some one-on-one time with the driver former McLaren teammate Jenson Button recently dubbed “the quickest guy that has ever driven a Formula 1 car.”

Automobile Magazine: What’s the big activity during your vacation?

Lewis Hamilton: Well, the next few days, we snowboard. We do snowmobiling. We do night paintballing in the snow. It’s just chilling out. A lot of gaming. We play a lot of video games, a lot of board games.

AM: Which video games are you into?

LH: “Call of Duty.”

AM: Not racing or car-related games?

LH: No, I don’t play those games much, really. The one I just played this year is the new “Gran Turismo,” which is sick. It’s really, really f****** good. It’s crazy to see because I had the first one, and to see it develop and how it is today, it’s super-impressive. I’ve got the steering wheel and a professional seat setup where we’re going today [in Colorado]. So we’ll have it set up, and we can play two-player. I’m excited about that.

AM: At this stage of your career, what do you think of the perception of you as portrayed by the traditional F1 press? You catch a lot of flak from European media for some of the things you do during your personal time, like jetting around the world to various events between races and hanging out with other celebrities, like Justin Bieber.

LH: I think it’s always been the case since I’ve been in Formula 1. There’s always been negativity, but, I mean, I generally don’t tend to focus on that. I think when I started to do these different things, people definitely commented on it and had opinions about it. Then they would say [I’m] not focused. It was a lot of work to kind of break the mold, break the shape of [what] people would expect a racing driver to be. This is a new day and age, and I’m the new. It’s not for others to decide what I am as a racing driver. It’s for me to discover and kind of watch it unfold. I think it’s been cool because I’ve been doing these different things and then I turn up and win, so they can’t say, really, anything. It’s just that I think we’re all a little different, and we should all strive to be different and shouldn’t shy away from it. But there are people in the world that tend to crawl into their shell and feel that they need to be a certain way because people expect them to be that way.

AM: Do you feel like you get more or less or the same amount of that criticism compared to in the past?

LH: I don’t know, and to be honest I don’t ever read the stuff. I really don’t care. Zero f**** is the term that I use. I know I’ve got my closest people around me. I’m still close to my family. Still have the same values as when I started out. Of course, people that tune in today, they see me at the top. They only see the success. They don’t see everything that I’ve done to be where I am today. People definitely don’t appreciate that. Some people don’t. I’m just trying to get in as much as I can in the time that I have whilst not losing performance. Then I have other things to move on to when I stop rather than being stuck where I currently am, which I would prefer not to be.

AM: Speaking of other things to do, your aunt died from cancer in 2012, and you’ve made a point before about how that impacted you …

LH: Definitely. We all go through some experiences that … they talk about building character and helping you prioritize and redirect your focuses. I think for me with my auntie, I think it was really [the case]. I mean naturally when someone tells you on their deathbed that they had been planning to do these things and then they’ve run out of time—I imagine how that is because a lot of people do that. My mom and friends have worked day in and day out and sacrificed things for the future, and then when you run out of road, you don’t get to do those things. It was definitely sad to see that, and just in that moment my auntie made me promise I was going to live life to the max and do everything and not hold back.

AM: How does that manifest with you?

Growing up in Stevenage, sitting with my mom and not having— We’d walk down to the bus stop to take a bus to town because we didn’t have a car. It’s just crazy to think I have cars now.

LH: Not wait until I’m 40 to go skiing. She was like, live in the now and not … obviously have a balance in the now and in the future, but live now, so for me that’s a massive highlight. That’s what I’m going to do. You just never know when … I’m still of the mindset you just never know when your day is up. A best friend of ours here today, her friend just got a call yesterday from the doctor saying that the friend only has one month to live. When that happens, what are you going to do? Hopefully that doesn’t happen to any of us, but it does happen in the world, and accidents happen, s***. I just want to know that if [my time is] cut short that I did everything up until that point in my life that I could.

AM: How do you manage to do all of the globe-trotting and other things you do between races yet still maintain peak performance in the car?

LH: I think I’m just used to it. My friends always say to me, “I don’t understand where you get the energy,” because I do usually have a lot of energy. I’m doing a lot of things. I think it’s really about how I’m able to switch off between the jobs or between racing. I can completely compartmentalize it, put it in the box, wait, close the drawer, wait until I need to focus on it. It doesn’t drain me.

AM: Is that a key point you’ve learned about human performance over the years?

LH: I guess it’s through trial and error. I’ve put tons of time into training [in the past] and then found it’s actually been worse for my performance if I don’t do anything else and only train every single day, with no other stimulation mentally. I perform worse [with that approach], so then it’s just about bit by bit taking it to here and dividing that 100 percent battery life you have. Dividing it a certain way across the different things that you plan on doing. Have some remaining so that you can use it for the racing. Do you know what I mean?

AM: In terms of dividing that energy, how much of your downtime is spent reviewing data from the racetrack?

LH: Yeah, yeah, that takes a lot of time. All the flights that I’m on, the long flights, I’m studying. When I’m in my hotel room, I’m studying. When I’m at the tracks, I’m studying. When I go back to the team’s factory, we’ll have a meeting, and they’re constantly sending me files and emails regarding car setup. All these different things, and we’ll go back and forth about setup, things we tested with, things that we might want to try. Then all the changes I make through the weekend. I wouldn’t say they use what I dictate, but I lead it. I make a general decision in that respect.

AM: Modern F1 teams collect so much data. How do you sort it all out in limited time?

LH: I have an engineer who’s got massive confidence in me. He knows there are times I come in and I’m like, s***, I’ve got four options of things to change. I’m not quite sure which ones they are, but this is my problem, or this [other thing] is my problem. Then we have that discussion; can we use that one or that one? The majority of the time, for like 90 percent of the time, I come in and I’m like, I need this. I’ve got this understood here. Change, you know, one [minor] setting lower or whatever it may be. That just comes with experience.

AM: Grand Prix cars are incredibly complex; is there one item in particular you absolutely have to get right every week?

LH: There’s not one point. There are so many pieces to the puzzle that have to come together. So tires are crucial, tire temperature, tire usage is of course crucial. [But overall] on-track setup is everything. It’s like, if I explain it like roads, you got a road that’s this length, this length, this length, and longer. You want to set the car up on the one that can go the furthest, basically, in terms of potential. You know what I mean? Sometimes you go on the wrong road with the setup and you limit yourself and you just can’t take it any further. Most times you just hit a wall, but if you get on the right path for the setup, it’s a longer … this is a really bad usage of terminology, but it’s a longer road, so you can really push the car further and expand more and extract more from it.

AM: Do you ever stop and look at your career, 11 years in, and think—surreal might not be the correct word here because everybody’s life is surreal in a lot of ways …

LH: Sure.

AM: But the reality is, your stats are piling up year after year, and you still appear to have a long way to go before you stop. Do you allow yourself to sit and smile about this stuff now, or are you saving those thoughts for when you’re finished in the sport?

Wild life: Hamilton’s Mercedes-AMG duties include assisting with development of the Project One. Despite his jet-setting schedule and an image criticized by some, we found him to be open and engaging during our informal chat.

LH: Yeah, I think for me, I think after I did the last race of 2017 and it just didn’t stop, there was no moment to stop. I just had days and days and days and days of PR events. I was at the factory, in the wind tunnel looking at the new car, the engineers talking to me about how the new car is going to be. Can’t stop for a second, really. Obviously now I’ll go away today and these next days I’ll be off for, so I’ll be sitting down, but I still don’t ever—of course when we talk about it, I’m like, it’s crazy how far we’ve come. But I don’t know. I think my ambition kind of overshadows it or clouds it because I’m just super-ambitious. Done one thing. I’m moving to the next thing. It’s just a tick, you know what I mean? It’s oh, wow, I’ve achieved it. It’s just now the next focus. It’s really, I’ve found a long-lasting game of chess, but there are lots of checkmates along the way.

AM: To your earlier point about maximizing every day, though, you do seem to absorb it as it happens, yes?

LH: You know I have a checkmate in lots of different things, moving to the next, what’s next, how can I better it? How can I grow? I’ve got so many things that I want to achieve, and the only question is—it’s not a question of if I can do it. It’s a question of time. I’m incredibly fortunate to do the things that I do. Look where we are today. I’m landing on the fricking plane this morning, and I’m thinking to myself, this just doesn’t seem real. It’s literally a fricking dream that I live. Because growing up in Stevenage, sitting watching a TV show with my mom and not having—we’d walk down to the bus stop to take a bus to town because we didn’t have a car. It’s just crazy to think I have cars now. It still doesn’t—even for my mom when she comes and sees the things that we have, even for her it doesn’t feel—it just feels weird. I don’t think I mentioned she had jobs and struggled so much. Now we do things, and it’s, I don’t know, it feels good, but it just feels very surreal.

AM: So that was the right word then.

LH: Every single day it feels surreal because it just doesn’t feel like it changes. I like that it does feel that way because if you get used to something, you get comfortable with something, then it’s easier to take things for granted. I don’t feel like my family generally does that, so that’s all about the people around you, grounded people. [I am] very, very, very careful who I select to be around me. I don’t have any weak-minded or negative individuals. I just get the most positive, lovely, real people around me.

AM: If you could talk to yourself at 10 years old and at 22 years old when you came into F1: Knowing what you know now and what you’ve experienced, what message would you deliver to those younger versions of yourself?

LH: I look back at myself, and I meet kids now that are so much more advanced than I was at their age. I was very, very timid, very, very much in a cocoon when I was younger. I didn’t hang around with kids on the weekends. I was super kept to myself, quiet. Yet I was still mischievous and outgoing and [a] daredevil. What I would just say to myself as a youngster and what I would like to do for my kid [one day] is ultimately, a human is like a plant growing, and you have to nurture the plant, you have to keep it watered and help it grow and give it light and those kind of things. Allow it to blossom in its natural form, and a lot of parents today … I’ve got cousins who are being pushed by their parent to do soccer, and often I think a parent’s job is to protect, but they can also be quite restricting. Or teachers or whatever, things force [kids] in an unnatural direction. What I’m saying is, for me I felt that I was held back when I was younger in terms of growing as a character, as a kid.

AM: Was that the system you were in, or … ?

LH: Just lots of things. It was school, it was pressures of not living a kid’s life—which I’m grateful that I went through, but I would just say I would somehow get the kid that I was and try and encourage him to be brighter and grow faster. By the time I really kind of grew into understanding who I was, I was frigging in my 20s, you know? There are a lot of 18-year-olds I see now or 17-year-olds who are so much more, who are already there, knowing what they want to do or knowing who they are, what kind of characters they are. So that’s great to see.

[jonathanbelloblog]

Lewis Hamilton Above the Noise

The chartered jet lands at Inyokern Airport just before noon on the Monday before Christmas. Formula 1 world champion Lewis Hamilton, just three weeks removed from the 2017 season finale and not two months since he clinched his fourth world title, disembarks from the rented plane along with a half dozen or so friends. Following a campaign that saw him win nine races to bring his career tally to 62 (second only to Michael Schumacher’s 91) and claim his 72nd pole position—the all-time record ahead of Schumacher’s 68 and the late Ayrton Senna’s 65—it’s a bit incongruous to see Hamilton hanging around this small desert airfield 145 miles northeast of Los Angeles. For the 32-year-old Briton, though, it’s the final stop on his 2017 work schedule after flying in from Los Angeles, where he spent several days in business meetings. Now, on his way to the Vail, Colorado, area, where he owns a ranch dubbed the “MegaZone,” his Mercedes-AMG employer has requested he make a detour from beginning his vacation in order to shoot some photos alongside his championship-winning race car and the company’s forthcoming Project One supercar. The company offered us a rare chance for some one-on-one time with the driver former McLaren teammate Jenson Button recently dubbed “the quickest guy that has ever driven a Formula 1 car.”

Automobile Magazine: What’s the big activity during your vacation?

Lewis Hamilton: Well, the next few days, we snowboard. We do snowmobiling. We do night paintballing in the snow. It’s just chilling out. A lot of gaming. We play a lot of video games, a lot of board games.

AM: Which video games are you into?

LH: “Call of Duty.”

AM: Not racing or car-related games?

LH: No, I don’t play those games much, really. The one I just played this year is the new “Gran Turismo,” which is sick. It’s really, really f****** good. It’s crazy to see because I had the first one, and to see it develop and how it is today, it’s super-impressive. I’ve got the steering wheel and a professional seat setup where we’re going today [in Colorado]. So we’ll have it set up, and we can play two-player. I’m excited about that.

AM: At this stage of your career, what do you think of the perception of you as portrayed by the traditional F1 press? You catch a lot of flak from European media for some of the things you do during your personal time, like jetting around the world to various events between races and hanging out with other celebrities, like Justin Bieber.

LH: I think it’s always been the case since I’ve been in Formula 1. There’s always been negativity, but, I mean, I generally don’t tend to focus on that. I think when I started to do these different things, people definitely commented on it and had opinions about it. Then they would say [I’m] not focused. It was a lot of work to kind of break the mold, break the shape of [what] people would expect a racing driver to be. This is a new day and age, and I’m the new. It’s not for others to decide what I am as a racing driver. It’s for me to discover and kind of watch it unfold. I think it’s been cool because I’ve been doing these different things and then I turn up and win, so they can’t say, really, anything. It’s just that I think we’re all a little different, and we should all strive to be different and shouldn’t shy away from it. But there are people in the world that tend to crawl into their shell and feel that they need to be a certain way because people expect them to be that way.

AM: Do you feel like you get more or less or the same amount of that criticism compared to in the past?

LH: I don’t know, and to be honest I don’t ever read the stuff. I really don’t care. Zero f**** is the term that I use. I know I’ve got my closest people around me. I’m still close to my family. Still have the same values as when I started out. Of course, people that tune in today, they see me at the top. They only see the success. They don’t see everything that I’ve done to be where I am today. People definitely don’t appreciate that. Some people don’t. I’m just trying to get in as much as I can in the time that I have whilst not losing performance. Then I have other things to move on to when I stop rather than being stuck where I currently am, which I would prefer not to be.

AM: Speaking of other things to do, your aunt died from cancer in 2012, and you’ve made a point before about how that impacted you …

LH: Definitely. We all go through some experiences that … they talk about building character and helping you prioritize and redirect your focuses. I think for me with my auntie, I think it was really [the case]. I mean naturally when someone tells you on their deathbed that they had been planning to do these things and then they’ve run out of time—I imagine how that is because a lot of people do that. My mom and friends have worked day in and day out and sacrificed things for the future, and then when you run out of road, you don’t get to do those things. It was definitely sad to see that, and just in that moment my auntie made me promise I was going to live life to the max and do everything and not hold back.

AM: How does that manifest with you?

Growing up in Stevenage, sitting with my mom and not having— We’d walk down to the bus stop to take a bus to town because we didn’t have a car. It’s just crazy to think I have cars now.

LH: Not wait until I’m 40 to go skiing. She was like, live in the now and not … obviously have a balance in the now and in the future, but live now, so for me that’s a massive highlight. That’s what I’m going to do. You just never know when … I’m still of the mindset you just never know when your day is up. A best friend of ours here today, her friend just got a call yesterday from the doctor saying that the friend only has one month to live. When that happens, what are you going to do? Hopefully that doesn’t happen to any of us, but it does happen in the world, and accidents happen, s***. I just want to know that if [my time is] cut short that I did everything up until that point in my life that I could.

AM: How do you manage to do all of the globe-trotting and other things you do between races yet still maintain peak performance in the car?

LH: I think I’m just used to it. My friends always say to me, “I don’t understand where you get the energy,” because I do usually have a lot of energy. I’m doing a lot of things. I think it’s really about how I’m able to switch off between the jobs or between racing. I can completely compartmentalize it, put it in the box, wait, close the drawer, wait until I need to focus on it. It doesn’t drain me.

AM: Is that a key point you’ve learned about human performance over the years?

LH: I guess it’s through trial and error. I’ve put tons of time into training [in the past] and then found it’s actually been worse for my performance if I don’t do anything else and only train every single day, with no other stimulation mentally. I perform worse [with that approach], so then it’s just about bit by bit taking it to here and dividing that 100 percent battery life you have. Dividing it a certain way across the different things that you plan on doing. Have some remaining so that you can use it for the racing. Do you know what I mean?

AM: In terms of dividing that energy, how much of your downtime is spent reviewing data from the racetrack?

LH: Yeah, yeah, that takes a lot of time. All the flights that I’m on, the long flights, I’m studying. When I’m in my hotel room, I’m studying. When I’m at the tracks, I’m studying. When I go back to the team’s factory, we’ll have a meeting, and they’re constantly sending me files and emails regarding car setup. All these different things, and we’ll go back and forth about setup, things we tested with, things that we might want to try. Then all the changes I make through the weekend. I wouldn’t say they use what I dictate, but I lead it. I make a general decision in that respect.

AM: Modern F1 teams collect so much data. How do you sort it all out in limited time?

LH: I have an engineer who’s got massive confidence in me. He knows there are times I come in and I’m like, s***, I’ve got four options of things to change. I’m not quite sure which ones they are, but this is my problem, or this [other thing] is my problem. Then we have that discussion; can we use that one or that one? The majority of the time, for like 90 percent of the time, I come in and I’m like, I need this. I’ve got this understood here. Change, you know, one [minor] setting lower or whatever it may be. That just comes with experience.

AM: Grand Prix cars are incredibly complex; is there one item in particular you absolutely have to get right every week?

LH: There’s not one point. There are so many pieces to the puzzle that have to come together. So tires are crucial, tire temperature, tire usage is of course crucial. [But overall] on-track setup is everything. It’s like, if I explain it like roads, you got a road that’s this length, this length, this length, and longer. You want to set the car up on the one that can go the furthest, basically, in terms of potential. You know what I mean? Sometimes you go on the wrong road with the setup and you limit yourself and you just can’t take it any further. Most times you just hit a wall, but if you get on the right path for the setup, it’s a longer … this is a really bad usage of terminology, but it’s a longer road, so you can really push the car further and expand more and extract more from it.

AM: Do you ever stop and look at your career, 11 years in, and think—surreal might not be the correct word here because everybody’s life is surreal in a lot of ways …

LH: Sure.

AM: But the reality is, your stats are piling up year after year, and you still appear to have a long way to go before you stop. Do you allow yourself to sit and smile about this stuff now, or are you saving those thoughts for when you’re finished in the sport?

Wild life: Hamilton’s Mercedes-AMG duties include assisting with development of the Project One. Despite his jet-setting schedule and an image criticized by some, we found him to be open and engaging during our informal chat.

LH: Yeah, I think for me, I think after I did the last race of 2017 and it just didn’t stop, there was no moment to stop. I just had days and days and days and days of PR events. I was at the factory, in the wind tunnel looking at the new car, the engineers talking to me about how the new car is going to be. Can’t stop for a second, really. Obviously now I’ll go away today and these next days I’ll be off for, so I’ll be sitting down, but I still don’t ever—of course when we talk about it, I’m like, it’s crazy how far we’ve come. But I don’t know. I think my ambition kind of overshadows it or clouds it because I’m just super-ambitious. Done one thing. I’m moving to the next thing. It’s just a tick, you know what I mean? It’s oh, wow, I’ve achieved it. It’s just now the next focus. It’s really, I’ve found a long-lasting game of chess, but there are lots of checkmates along the way.

AM: To your earlier point about maximizing every day, though, you do seem to absorb it as it happens, yes?

LH: You know I have a checkmate in lots of different things, moving to the next, what’s next, how can I better it? How can I grow? I’ve got so many things that I want to achieve, and the only question is—it’s not a question of if I can do it. It’s a question of time. I’m incredibly fortunate to do the things that I do. Look where we are today. I’m landing on the fricking plane this morning, and I’m thinking to myself, this just doesn’t seem real. It’s literally a fricking dream that I live. Because growing up in Stevenage, sitting watching a TV show with my mom and not having—we’d walk down to the bus stop to take a bus to town because we didn’t have a car. It’s just crazy to think I have cars now. It still doesn’t—even for my mom when she comes and sees the things that we have, even for her it doesn’t feel—it just feels weird. I don’t think I mentioned she had jobs and struggled so much. Now we do things, and it’s, I don’t know, it feels good, but it just feels very surreal.

AM: So that was the right word then.

LH: Every single day it feels surreal because it just doesn’t feel like it changes. I like that it does feel that way because if you get used to something, you get comfortable with something, then it’s easier to take things for granted. I don’t feel like my family generally does that, so that’s all about the people around you, grounded people. [I am] very, very, very careful who I select to be around me. I don’t have any weak-minded or negative individuals. I just get the most positive, lovely, real people around me.

AM: If you could talk to yourself at 10 years old and at 22 years old when you came into F1: Knowing what you know now and what you’ve experienced, what message would you deliver to those younger versions of yourself?

LH: I look back at myself, and I meet kids now that are so much more advanced than I was at their age. I was very, very timid, very, very much in a cocoon when I was younger. I didn’t hang around with kids on the weekends. I was super kept to myself, quiet. Yet I was still mischievous and outgoing and [a] daredevil. What I would just say to myself as a youngster and what I would like to do for my kid [one day] is ultimately, a human is like a plant growing, and you have to nurture the plant, you have to keep it watered and help it grow and give it light and those kind of things. Allow it to blossom in its natural form, and a lot of parents today … I’ve got cousins who are being pushed by their parent to do soccer, and often I think a parent’s job is to protect, but they can also be quite restricting. Or teachers or whatever, things force [kids] in an unnatural direction. What I’m saying is, for me I felt that I was held back when I was younger in terms of growing as a character, as a kid.

AM: Was that the system you were in, or … ?

LH: Just lots of things. It was school, it was pressures of not living a kid’s life—which I’m grateful that I went through, but I would just say I would somehow get the kid that I was and try and encourage him to be brighter and grow faster. By the time I really kind of grew into understanding who I was, I was frigging in my 20s, you know? There are a lot of 18-year-olds I see now or 17-year-olds who are so much more, who are already there, knowing what they want to do or knowing who they are, what kind of characters they are. So that’s great to see.